Abstract
The article deals with a wide range of pre-war actions of the Soviet leadership, aimed at preparing the country to repel the Nazi aggression. The most important of them were steps on the territorial expansion of the Soviet Union and the accession of Baltic and Bessarabia, the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus, as well as the Soviet-Finnish War, which allowed to move the border 120 km from Leningrad, and fighting with the Japanese forces at Lake Khasan and Khalkhin Goal River allows rejecting Japanese aggression from the Soviet Union. Attention is also paid to the preparation of the German attack on the USSR and the Soviet plans reflection of German aggression.
Keywords
“Phoney War”, Katyn case, the Baltic States, Poland, the USSR, the Soviet-Finnish War 1939—1940, Lake Hassan, Khalkhin Gol River, Mongolia, G. K. Zhukov, K. G. E. Mannerheim, K. A. Meretskov, S. K. Tymoshenko, A. Hitler, G. Goering, I. Ribbentrop, W. Brauchitsch, military planning
