A significant number of Russian nationals were first brought to the territory of modern Croatia, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as prisoners of war during the First World War; some of them remained there after the war ended in 1918. In 1920, there began mass immigration of refugees fleeing the Soviet-controlled Russia to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; some of those people settled in what is now Croatia, first mainly in Dubrovnik and Split, later in Zagreb and elsewhere. The government of the Kingdom of SHS in early 1920 established the State Commission for Russian Refugees at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (that category then included all arrivals from the former Russian Empire irrespective of their actual ethnicity). But even before that, the government had appointed a special official who was charged with reception and accommodation of arrivals from Russia; the position was given to , a former senior official in the Russian Ministry of the Interior. Major Russian communities (″colonies″) were established in Dubrovnik, Split, Crikvenica, Zagreb, and some other towns in the early 1920s, while the majority of those arriving in the Kingdom eventually settled in Serbia. The government of the Kingdom of SHS explained its hospitality afforded to Russian exiles 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 World War I.