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. The Kingdom of SHS became home for 40,000 exiles from the Russian Empire. 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). The exiled Russian clergy's devotion and dedication to the Church was held up as an example by the churchpeople in Serbia. The ROCOR's Head Metropolitan Anthony Khrapovitsky was widely viewed as a spiritual leader of all the Russian émigrés until his death in 1936. Patriarch Varnava of Serbia (1930–1937) came to be a staunch defender and advocate of the Russian exiles in Yugoslavia and exerted constant pressure on the Royal Court and government to forestall any rapprochement and establishment of diplomatic relations between Yugoslavia and the USSR. The Russian community in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was effectively in a privileged position in a number of ways, as it enjoyed support and protection on the part of the Karađorđević dynasty. The Russian military servicemen under the command of Gen Pyotr Wrangel were partly enlisted into Yugoslavia's border guard troops and deployed on the country's south-eastern and later north-western border. This service was terminated by a law passed in April 1922 that abolished the border guard troops; in 1923–1924 Wrangel's men were engaged in a contract to build a road between Kraljevo and Raška. At the Genoa Conference in spring of 1922, there occurred a spat between Soviet Russia's delegation and that of the Kingdom of SHS over the absence of a delegation from Montenegro; a meeting between Georgy Chicherin and Momčilo Ninčić took place on the sidelines of the conference: the sides arrived at a pro forma agreement that the government of the Kingdom would prevent further activities of Russian émigrés in its territory. Nevertheless, Russian émigré activity continued apace: multiple Russian military officers′ associations were set up in Yugoslavia, which in 1924 were united under an umbrella council headed by