Viktor Suvorov, Russian intelligence officer, historian, and author
Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun (Russian: Владимир Богданович Резун; born 20 April 1947), known by his pseudonym of Viktor Suvorov (Виктор Суворов) is a former Soviet GRU officer who is the author of non-fiction books about World War II, the GRU and the Soviet Army, as well as fictional books about the same and related subjects.
After defecting to the United Kingdom in 1978, Suvorov began his writing career, publishing his first books in the 1980s about his own experiences and the structure of the Soviet military, intelligence, and secret police. He writes in Russian with a number of his books translated into English, including his semi-autobiographical The Liberators (1981). In the USSR, according to Suvorov and according to an interview with the former head of the GRU, he was sentenced to death in absentia.In his military history books, he offers an alternative view of the role of the USSR in World War II; the first and most well-known book on this topic being Icebreaker: Who started the Second World War?. The proposed concept and the methods of its substantiation have caused numerous discussions and criticism in historical and social circles. In Icebreaker, M Day and several follow-up books Suvorov argued that Joseph Stalin planned to use Nazi Germany as a proxy (the “Icebreaker”) against the West. The books are based on his personal analysis of Soviet military investments, diplomatic maneuvers, Politburo speeches and other circumstantial evidence.
Suvorov also wrote a number of fiction books about the Soviet Army, military intelligence and the pre-war history of the USSR. The trilogy Control, Choice and Snake-eater was a bestseller and was approached for movie adaptations. According to Novye Izvestia, an online newspaper, the circulation of some of Suvorov's books exceeds a million copies.