6 January Dictatorship

The 6 January Dictatorship (Serbian: Шестојануарска диктатура, Šestojanuarska diktatura; Croatian: Šestosiječanjska diktatura; Slovene: Šestojanuarska diktatura) was a royal dictatorship established in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Kingdom of Yugoslavia after 1929) by King Alexander I (r. 1921–34) with the ultimate goal to create a Yugoslav ideology and a single Yugoslav nation. It began on 6 January 1929, when the king prorogued parliament and assumed control of the state, and ended with the 1931 Yugoslav Constitution.

Alexander I of Yugoslavia

History

In 1928, Croatian Peasant Party leader Stjepan Radić was assassinated in the Parliament of Yugoslavia by a Montenegrin Serb leader and People's Radical Party politician Puniša Račić, during a tense argument.^[1]

On 6 January 1929, using as a pretext the political crisis triggered by the shooting, King Alexander abolished the Vidovdan Constitution, prorogued the Parliament and assumed dictatorial powers.^[2] General Petar Živković, commander of the Royal Guard, became prime minister.^[3]

He appointed a cabinet solely responsible to him, and imposed tight censorship on the press. Trying to reconcile ethnic tensions, especially between Serbian and Croatian politicians, Alexander aimed to establish the Yugoslav ideology and a single Yugoslav nation.^[4][5][6] He changed the name of the country to "Kingdom of Yugoslavia", and changed the internal divisions from the 33 oblasts to nine new banovinas on 3 October. This decision was made following a proposal by the British ambassador to better decentralize the country, modeled on Czechoslovakia.^[7]

Alexander outlawed all political parties based on ethnic, religious, or regional distinctions, reorganized the state administratively, and standardized legal systems, school curricula, and national holidays.^[8]

A Court for the Protection of the State was soon established to act as the new regime's tool for putting down any dissent.^[9]

Immediately after the dictatorship was proclaimed, Croatian deputy Ante Pavelić left for exile from the country. The following years Pavelić worked to establish a revolutionary organization, the Ustaše, allied with the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) against the state.^[9]

In 1931, Alexander decreed a new Constitution which vested the King with executive power. Elections were to be by universal male suffrage. The provision for a secret ballot was dropped, and pressure on public employees to vote for the governing party was to be a feature of all elections held under Alexander's constitution. Further, half the upper house was directly appointed by the King, and legislation could become law with the approval of one of the houses alone if also approved by the King.^[10]

That same year, Croatian historian and anti-Yugoslavist intellectual^[11] Milan Šufflay was assassinated in Zagreb. As a response, Albert Einstein and Heinrich Mann sent an appeal to the International League of Human Rights in Paris condemning the murder, accusing the Yugoslav government. The letter states of a "horrible brutality which is being practiced upon the Croatian People".^[12] In their letter, Einstein and Mann held the Yugoslav king Aleksandar explicitly responsible for these circumstances.^[12]

A Yugoslav Radical Peasants' Democracy political party was founded as a coalition of regime-friendly parties under Yugoslavism. In November 1932, the Peasant-Democratic Coalition, consisting of Serb and Croat opposition parties demanded the reintroduction of parliamentarianism and restructuring of the state, resulting in massive protests. Opposition politicians such as Vladko Maček and Svetozar Pribićević were arrested.^[13] Pribićević later went into exile, whereas over the course of the 1930s Maček would become the leader of the entire opposition bloc.^[14]

Despite these measures, opposition to the dictatorship continued, with Croats calling for a solution to what was called the "Croatian question". In late 1934, the King planned to release Maček from prison, introduce democratic reforms, and attempt to find common ground between Serbs and Croats.^{[citation needed]}

However, on 9 October 1934, the king was assassinated in Marseille, France, by the Bulgarian Veličko Kerin (also known by his revolutionary pseudonym Vlado Chernozemski), an activist of IMRO, in a conspiracy with Yugoslav exiles and radical members of banned political parties in cooperation with the Croatian extreme nationalist Ustaše organisation.^[9]