The actual Russian population of Russian Alaska had been small. But, during the second half of the nineteenth century, after its sale, a number of Russians drifted across the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco. The seat of the Archbishopric of the Aleutian Islands and North America was moved from Sitka to San Francisco. In 1900, there were enough Russians on the Atlantic coast to warrant Tikhon, later Patriarch of Moscow, moving his episcopal seat to New York.[16] This was done not only to serve the needs of the Russian Orthodox population but to enable him to exert an influence on the Greeks and other Orthodox who had emigrated to the east coast. About 1905, the difficulties between the Roman Catholic hierarchy and the Catholics of the Eastern Rite made opportune a Russian attempt to bring the Eastern Rite adherents back to Orthodoxy. At the outbreak of World War I the bulk of the Russian Orthodox Church in America consisted of converts from Galicia and the Carpathians. There also had been Russian immigration after the revolutionary disturbances of 1905, but in 1904 the actual Russian immigration in America was small, far less in numbers than any other Slavic group except the Bulgarians. By 1914, the Slavic communities in the United States especially the Czechs, the Slovaks and the Poles, were already well organized. These, with their national committees, played a considerable role in securing the independence of their homeland. They supported directly and through their American non-Slavic friends the work of Thomas G. Masaryk and Ignace Paderewski. Similarly, Professor Michael I. Pupin stood out as the leader of the Serbs and indeed of all the Yugoslavs. The Ukrainians were less fortunate, for at the moment they had no leader well known to the American public and they encountered the opposition of both Russian and Polish groups, whose nations had dominated Ukraine for centuries. After World War I, the interrupted stream of immigration again broke through and during the early years it assumed even larger proportions than it had previously. In addition, many White Russians who had fled from the Bolsheviks came to the United States. The cultural level of the Slavic communities rose rapidly, assisted by better educational opportunities for them both at home and in the immigration. A large number of highly educated Russians had come over and the opening of Washington legations for Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia gave the immigrants pride in their own origin and intensified their contact with cultural work being done in their liberated homelands. The same effect was achieved by the Ukrainian diplomatic mission to Washington under Dr. Bachinsky and later Dr. Luke Myshuha, although unfortunately this did not receive final recognition by the United States.