Dr. Paul Craig Roberts - Hitler attacked first

and pre-empted a Soviet first strike that was intended to conquer Europe. Roberts, who was Asst. Sect. of the Treasury under Regan, opined that Stalin intended to conquer Europe but that Hitler beat him to the punch. Roberts relies on Suvorov, a former NKVD Agent who had access to the files.

World War II Was Stalin’s War - PaulCraigRoberts.org

I've not read Suvorov's writings. I can envision Stalin wanting to conquer Europe. A lot of Europe was disarmed and comquered already (Poland, Belgian, Holland, Denmark, and France. Once past the German defenders, everything else would have been easy (provided the supplies could keep up).

But it's hard to believe that the Red Army that was being reorganized after the purges of many of its top officers was ready to go on the offensive. Soviets had better tanks (KV-1, T-34) but in the case of the latter many of them didn't have trained crews. There may have been initial success, but then the Wehrmacht would begin cutting up the Red Army for breakfast on its own territory.

 

Stalin expected, to my knowledge, that Hitler would exhaust his troops in the western front, and then he would attack and conquer Europe.

Stalin seemed to be more than little suspecting people betray him. Richard Sorge told him about the German offensive but Stalin instead claimed Sorge was staying with whores and kept on drinking alcohol and lied all the while.

Stalin kept on getting warnings of Barbarossa but he considered just that people tried to break the relationship between him and Hitler and ignored the warnings.

 

This would have been a great post on April 1st...

Train wreck from the first sentence.

 

About 1,000 of them; the rest of their 20,000+ tanks were BTs, T-26s, T-28s, older types, light tanks, etc. As you noted, crews were not prepared to operate or maintain them effectively. Also, the Red Army was in the process of reorganizing its armored forces; most of the ~30 mechanized corps in existence in June 1941 had only started forming between January and May. Previously most of their tanks had been in brigades attached to infantry or cavalry formations. It seems unlikely that they were planning an offensive while reshuffling their principal striking force.

In the air, about half of their fighters were I-16s and 1/4 I-15/153 biplanes. A new generation of inline-engine monoplanes - MiG-3, LaGG-3, Yak-1 - comparable to German or western types were just coming into service. The Il-2 ground attack aircraft was also just being introduced.

Even if Stalin was planning an offensive, I doubt he was planning one in 1941.

Granted the German military was also improving. Most notably IMO the panzer force would have had a higher proportion of Panzer IIIs and IVs, halftracks, etc. if hostilities had not broken out until 1942 or later. Still it seems clear that additional time would have benefitted the Soviets more profoundly.

 

1942, the earliest, with 3,500-4,000 t-34' s with attack supported.

 

sigh....
There is no question that both dictators would have gone for each other's throats sooner or later.
The basic idea of communism was world revolution and Vladimir Illjitsch already stated: Whoever rules Germany rules Europe. In the 1920s, they failed with the revolution in Germany because of the Freikorps, but they never gave up the idea.
BUT:
Corporal Schicklgruber would have attacked the SU in any case. He had already explained this long before the war: Destruction of Bolshevism, Lebensraum im Osten, bla, bla, bla....
And in 1941 the opportunity seemed favourable to him: the Red Army had not yet digested the purges by a long shot and was in the process of restructuring: A surprise strike against the contingents massed along the border without formation in depth was ideally suited for energetic operational tank breakthroughs in order to subsequently wage the classic Cannae-style annihilation battles so favoured by the OKW: The Polish army had made the same mistake in 1939, and this was exactly how he caught the RA with their trousers down in 1941, too

But you have to get very creative to deduce a pre-emptive strike from a war of conquest planned from the outset: This would also have taken place if Uncle Joe had been a Chamberlain in spirit.