Stalin’s purge of the Greeks of the USSR begins.

December 15th, 1937 – Stalin’s purge of the Greeks of the USSR begins.

By official Soviet decree (50215), the repression and persecution of the Greeks, begins in the Soviet Union and would last 13 years.

By 1937, almost 300,000 Greeks were registered in the official Soviet census. Most of these Greeks were themselves already survivors, who had only years earlier fled persecution as a result of the Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing inflicted by the Turks (assisted by Russia) against the Greeks of Eastern Thrace, Asia Minor and Pontos (1914-1923), to find refuge in the USSR, which would not last.

Thousands of Greeks were either executed on the spot, or transferred to gulags in Siberia to work in forced labour camps, where they would work until death.

Thousands of Greeks would flee the Soviet Union and by 1950, estimates put the Greek death toll at a minimum of 20,000 and 50,000 at the higher end of the scale.