From 1930 to 1952, the government of the Soviet Union, on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin under the direction of the NKVD official Lavrentiy Beria, forcibly transferred populations of various groups. These actions may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population, 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.

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a Georgian-born Soviet politician and revolutionary who was the longest-serving leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1922 to 1952, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1941 until his death. Initially governing the country as part of a collective leadership, Stalin consolidated his power to become a dictator by the 1930s. Ideologically, he formalised his Leninist interpretation of Marxism as Marxism–Leninism, while the political and economic system he implemented is known as Stalinism.