Population transfer in the Soviet Union () was the forced transfer by the Soviet government of various groups from 1930 up to 1952 ordered by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and executed by the NKVD official Lavrentiy Beria. It may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population (often classified as "enemies of workers"), deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill ethnically cleansed territories. Dekulakization marked the first time that an entire class was deported, whereas the deportation of Soviet Koreans in 1937 marked the precedent of a specific ethnic deportation of an entire nationality.