After the Russian Civil War ended in 1922 in a Bolshevik victory, relations between the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union remained frosty. Since 1920, the government of the Kingdom of SHS welcomed tens of thousands of anti-Bolshevik Russian refugees,[1] mainly those who fled after the final defeat of the Russian Army under General Pyotr Wrangel in Crimea in November 1920, explaining its hospitality by presenting it as paying back the debt Serbia owed Russia for the latter's intervention on the side of Serbia at the outbreak of WWI.[7] The Kingdom of SHS became home for 40.000 exiles from the Russian Empire.[8] In 1921, at the invitation of the Serbian Patriarch Dimitrije, the leadership of the Russian Church in exile moved from Constantinople to Serbia and in September 1922 in Karlovci (until 1920, the seat of the abolished Patriarchate of Karlovci) established a de facto independent ecclesiastical administration that a few years later was instituted as the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR).