The Soviet government forcibly transferred the whole of the Vainakh populations of the North Caucasus to Central Asia on 23 February 1944, during World War II. The expulsion, referred to by Chechens often as Aardakh, was ordered by NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria after approval by Soviet leader and dictator Joseph Stalin as part of a Soviet forced settlement program and population transfer that affected several million members of ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union between the 1930s and the 1950s.