Deportation of the Soviet Greeks
The deportation of the Soviet Greeks was a series of forced transfers of Greeks of the Soviet Union that was ordered by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. It was carried out in 1942, 1944 and 1949 and affected mostly Pontic Greeks along the Black Sea coast resulting in ethnic cleansing of this area. It was estimated that around 50,000 Greeks were deported. History. The 1926 Soviet census registered 213,765 Greeks in the country and 286,000 in the 1939 census. On 9 August 1937, NKVD order 00485 was adopted to target "subversive activities of Polish intelligence" in  the Soviet Union, but was later expanded to also include Latvians, Germans, Estonians, Finns, Greeks, Iranians and Chinese. There was virtually no counter-revolutionary activity among the Soviet Greeks, though there were exceptions in Constantine Kromiadi, an anti-communist of Greek origin, who became second in command in Andrey Vlasov "Abwehr" detachment during the Nazi German occupation of the Soviet Union in World War II. Soviet Greeks were deported in three waves as part of the population transfer in the Soviet Union. One of the deported Greeks who was born near Sukhumi and sent to the Pahtaral region of Uzbekistan  in 1949, recalled the events: On 25 September 1956, MVD Order N 0402 was adopted and defined the removal of restrictions towards the deported peoples in the special settlements. Afterward, the Soviet Greeks started returning to their homes, or emigrating towards Greece. Officially, the 1949 deportation was explained by the USSR as trying to cleanse the border areas from "politically unreliable elements". Russian historian Alexander Nekrich assumes that the Greeks were deported in 1949 because of the alliance of Greece with the UK. Others consider it as a collective punishment because the Greek communists lost in the Greek Civil War  during 1946-1949. In 1938, 20,000 Soviet Greeks arrived to Greece. Between 1965 and 1975, another 15,000 Greeks emigrated from the Soviet Union and went to Greece. Unlike many other 'punished' ethnic groups, the Soviet Greeks were never officially rehabilitated by the Soviet legislation. They were however officially rehabilitated, among with other ethnic groups by the Russian Federation, amended by Decree no. 458 of September 12, 2015.