Soviet leaders and authorities officially condemned nationalism and proclaimed internationalism and anti-nationalism, including the right of nations and peoples to self-determination. Soviet internationalism during the era of the USSR and within its borders meant diversity or multiculturalism. This is because the USSR used the term "nation" to refer to ethnic or national communities and or ethnic groups. The Soviet Union claimed to be supportive of self-determination and rights of many minorities and colonized peoples. However, it significantly marginalized people of certain ethnic groups designated as "enemies of the people", pushed their assimilation, and promoted chauvinistic Russian nationalistic and settler-colonialist activities in their lands. Whereas Vladimir Lenin had supported and implemented policies of korenizatsiia (integration of non-Russian nationalities into the governments of their specific Soviet republics), Joseph Stalin reversed much of the previous policies, signing off on orders to deport and exile multiple ethnic-linguistic groups brandished as "traitors to the Fatherland", including the Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Kalmyks, Koreans and Meskhetian Turks, with those who survived the collective deportation to Siberia or Central Asia legally designated "special settlers", meaning that they were officially second-class citizens with few rights and were confined within small perimeters.

After the death of Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev criticized the deportations based on ethnicity in a secret section of his report to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, describing them as "rude violations of the basic Leninist principles of the nationality policy of the Soviet state". Soon thereafter, in the mid- to late 1950s, some deported peoples were fully rehabilitated, having been allowed the full right of return, and their national republics were restored — except for the Koreans, Crimean Tatars, and Meskhetian Turks, who were not granted the right of return and were instead forced to stay in Central Asia. The government subsequently took a variety of measures to prevent such deported peoples from returning to their native villages, ranging from denying residence permits to people of certain ethnic groups in specific areas, referring to people by incorrect ethnonyms to minimize ties to their homeland (ex, "Tatars that formerly resided in Crimea" instead of "Crimean Tatars"), arresting protesters for requesting the right of return and spreading racist propaganda demonizing ethnic minorities.^{[citation needed]}

Deportation of Koreans in the Soviet Union, originally conceived in 1926, initiated in 1930, and carried through in 1937, was the first mass transfer of an entire nationality in the Soviet Union. Almost the entire Soviet population of ethnic Koreans (171,781 persons) were forcefully moved from the Russian Far East to unpopulated areas of the Kazakh SSR and the Uzbek SSR in October 1937. Before the deportation, three articles were published in the state organ Pravda, claiming that Buddhists organized Japanese sabotage, and claiming that a list of occupations that were widely worked in by Chinese and Koreans in the Soviet Union, were agents of Japan. There is evidence that Stalin edited these articles. The justification for deportation resolution 1428-326cc was that it had been planned with the aim to "prevent the infiltration of Japanese spies to the Far East." However, no conclusive documents or other information on the matter have ever been found.

Despite the Soviet Union accusing the Koreans of being "Japanese proxies", the Soviet Union would sign a 1925 Convention with Imperial Japan, granting it "most favoured nation" status, granting the Empire extensive timber and fishing rights, and later providing the Empire with oil and coal concessions inside the Soviet Union that were expanded as late as 1939. and lasted until 1943. After the deportation to Central Asia, some two thousand Soviet Koreans (or more) remained on northern Sakhalin for the expressed purpose of working on the Soviet-Japanese concessions (ie. joint-ventures). This act completely refutes the reason/the rationale for the deportation of Koreans ("to prevent the infiltration of Japanese espionage") as well as the "Soviet xenophobia" argument ("ideological" not racial) argument of scholars such as Terry Martin. Ironically, the Soviet Koreans found themselves working alongside Japanese laborers and managers because of their government's (Stalin's) economic policies and need for hard currency (the 1925 Convention). For Chang, these events on N. Sakahlin (after the deportation order) debunk the myth that the Soviets were staunch and ideologically pure socialists. The number of Japanese laborers was typically from 700 to 1500, but sometimes more. Another irony was that a large number of the "Japanese" laborers were in fact, Koreans from Korea (northern and southern regions). Seemingly the Koreans could not catch a break from the clutches of the Japanese ("Asia for Asians, we will free you from non-Asian colonialism") nor the Soviets. Keep in mind, it was Japan's responsibility (per the 1925 Soviet-Japanese Convention) to manage and pay the salaries of the laborers and the managers. The USSR needed only to supply the resources. Japan was to divide the earnings typically 50-50 with the USSR and to pay the USSR in cash and sometimes in gold bullion.

Historian Jon K. Chang described major Tsarist continuities in chauvinism and views on race. The USSR's policy towards Koreans demonstrated a widespread belief in primordialism—the idea that ethnic groups were permanent, ancient and unassimilable—which contributed to Soviet bureaucracy's paranoia on perceived disloyal nationalities. The writings of Lev Shternberg and Vladimir Arsenev, two of the leading ethnographers in the early Soviet Union. showed their belief in "biological" nationality, a refusal to believe linguistic assimilation or religious conversion, and tropes of "yellow peril" where Koreans were conflated with Japan and perceived as conspiring or having questionable loyalty. The leadership of the Soviet Far East had already adopted a resolution in 1923 suggesting resettling Koreans away from the border, but this initial proposal had been rejected by Moscow and did not yet culminate in the mass-scale deportation later, although a deportation of 600-800 Korean workers to Japan occurred that year. In 1928, Arsenev's report for Dalkraikom claimed that the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean workers were "predators" against Russians. Even as tsarist-era writers became less prominent in the Soviet Union, the belief in primordialism would continue through passportisation and Stalinist deportations of ethnicities, being expressed most overtly from the 1930s.

The Soviet regime performed mass arrests and deportations on people of Chinese descent. By the 1930s about 24,600 Chinese lived in the Russian Far East, and were targeted by Soviet policies that became increasingly repressive against diaspora nationalities, leading to deportation and exile. A major Chinese community in the Soviet Union was in Millionka in Vladivostok. In 1936 after the NKVD identified 12 Chinese who were claimed to be spies for Japan, 4,202 Chinese residents of Vladivostok were deported, and many others were arrested. The NKVD official responsible said that "As of today Big and Little 'Millionka' no longer exist". On 22 December 1937, Nikolai Yezhov ordered the NKVD to “arrest all Chinese, regardless of their citizenship, who are engaged in provocative activities or have terrorist intentions.” Over the following year, 11,198 Chinese residents in the Russian Far East were exiled to other areas of the Soviet Union, such as Kazakhstan, or deported to China.

Then there is the issue of East Asians in Soviet intelligence serving from 1920 to 1945 in Soviet operations called Maki-Mirage, Dreamers, Shogun and Organizator. The Chinese and Korean deportations in 1937-38 and 1937 respectively were carried out to stop "the further penetration of Japanese espionage." The two East Asian groups were labelled as "not sufficiently Sovietized," potential fifth columnists, vectors of foreign influence and espionage and the Soviet xenophobia theory stating that the "ethnic cleansing was never racial and always ideological, that these deported peoples possessed or represented political ideologies inimical to Soviet socialism." If any or all of these facts are true, why the continued to use hundreds of them from 1937 to 1945, East Asians in Soviet intelligence? The use of the "deported peoples" to defend the country in Soviet intelligence operations, the same people labelled as traitorous makes no sense unless we understand that the USSR was deeply hypocritical. Its racial hierarchies and racism were deeply ingrained and the state practiced "socialism " in name (and propaganda only). In reality, it was simply a totalitarian polity-- an authoritarian state which tried to control all forms of thought, practices (social, cultural and political), and identities (class, occupational, gender, racial/ethnic, political).

The deportations of 1943, codenamed Operation Ulussy, were the deportation of most people of the Kalmyk nationality in the Soviet Union, and Russian women married to Kalmyks, except Kalmyk women married to another nationality. The Kalmyk people had been accused of collaboration with the Nazis as a whole. The decision was made in December 1943, when NKVD agents entered the homes of Kalmyks, or registered the names of those absent for deportation later, and packed them into cargo wagons and transported them to various locations in Siberia: Altai Krai, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Omsk Oblast, and Novosibirsk Oblast. Around half of (97,000–98,000) Kalmyk people deported to Siberia died before being allowed to return home in 1957.