Greek Operation of the NKVD

The Greek Operation (, translit. Grecheskaya Operatsiya; ) was an organised mass persecution of the Greeks of the Soviet Union that was ordered by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Greeks often use the term "pogrom" (πογκρόμ) for this persecution, though this term usually refers to mob violence rather than persecution by police acting under direct orders, as this one was. It began on December 15, 1937, and marked the beginning of the repressions against Greeks that went on for 13 years. Depending on the sources, it is estimated that between 20,000 and 50,000 Greeks died by the end of this campaign.
A wave of Greek emigrants from the Soviet Union in 1937–1939 is often considered a consequence of Stalinist persecution of the Soviet Greek national movement.
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.
The prosecution of Greeks in USSR was gradual: at first, the authorities shut down the Greek schools, cultural centres, and publishing houses. Then, the secret police indiscriminately arrested all Greek men 16 years old or older. All Greeks who were wealthy or self-employed professionals were sought for prosecution first.
On many occasions, the central authorities sent telegrams to police forces with orders to arrest a certain number of Greeks, without giving any individual names, and the police officers would arrest at random any persons of Greek origin until they reached the requested total number of arrests until the process was repeated at a later date. In all, some 50,000 Greeks died from this persecution.
Some sources claim that there was no widespread counter-revolutionary activity among the Soviet Greeks, though there were exceptions in Constantine Kromiadi, an anti-communist of Greek origin, who later became second in command in Andrey Vlasov "Abwehr" detachment during the Nazi German occupation of the Soviet Union in World War II and Vladimir Mikhailovich Despotuli.
Axis collaboration.
About one thousand Greeks from Greece and more from the Soviet Union, ostensibly avenging their ethnic persecution from Soviet authorities, joined the Waffen-SS, mostly in Ukrainian divisions. A special case was that of the infamous Ukrainian-Greek Sevastianos Foulidis, a fanatical anti-communist who had been recruited by the Abwehr as early as 1938 and became an official of the Wehrmacht, with extensive action in intelligence and agitation work in the Eastern front.
Remembrance.
In 1938, 20,000 Soviet Greeks arrived in Greece. Between 1965 and 1975, another 15,000 Greeks emigrated from the Soviet Union and went to Greece. A monument to all Greek victims of GULAG was unveiled in Magadan in 2011. Unlike many other 'punished' ethnic groups, the Soviet Greeks were never officially rehabilitated by the Soviet legislation. In the early 1990s, a movement arose advocating the creation of a new Greek autonomy in the Krasnodar region, but it failed to achieve support. One Soviet Greek man, born in 1959, described this outcome with the following words:
Soviet Greeks were officially rehabilitated, among with other ethnic groups by Russian Federation, amended by Decree no. 458 of September 12, 2015.