Elsewhere in Icebreaker the author touches an important thing. And it's the rhethoric of the bolsheviks/communists/marxists which western writers constantly misunderstand. I think he is kinda right. The communists didn't (don't) exactly mean the same when they talk about something. Or rather they have a special view on things and have different definitions than normal people have. Most known example when they say liberation they think occupation. Or when they occupy a country, they say they liberated it (I'll get back to this in a minute). It's like Orwell's 1984: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
For the communist there's two types of war. An aggressive unjust, and a defensive just. An imperialist state only can wage unjust wars, all they do is aggression, oppressed states, oppressed people's war however always just. Oppressed people, the proletariat, defends and liberates itself through these wars. And when the Soviet Union attacks a country, normal people (the reactionary imperialist oppressors) only see a sovereign country attacking another sovereign country and occupying it (like it happened with the Baltic states) but for the communist it's just the proletariat liberates itself from another country's bourgeois oppression. Because for the communist not one nation exists (he is internationalist) only proletarians and bourgeois, he sees the whole world's proletariat one body whereupon the imperialists built their states separating them from each other. In the Soviet Union there's no bourgeois so they have the arms for the self liberation of the workers in other countries.
So when the communists talked about preparing for defense that didn't meant they prepared for defending their own country, but defending the proletariat from the imperialist aggression, the proletariat of Europe, west from the Soviet Union. Translated to normal people's language: they prepared to attack Germany.

What I really don't like in Suvorovs book is the abhorrent way of handling sources. He gives a Bibliography, but no footnotes or endnotes. He frequently use inline source notations but only for quotes or other lines where he paraphrase something. He presents a bunch of data without any support, for example the talks about the BT tanks and their capabilities but doesn't give anything where he got these details. Ofc I can look it up in other books if he talks about legit stuff, or on that site Turkish Bernd posted, but wtf, these things supposed to be there.