6 January Dictatorship


The 6 January Dictatorship was a royal dictatorship established in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes by King Alexander I with the ultimate goal to create the Yugoslav ideology and single Yugoslav nation. It lasted from 6 January 1929, when the king prorogued parliament and assumed control of the state, and ended with the 1931 Yugoslav Constitution.

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.
Trying to reconcile ethnic tensions, especially between Serbian and Croatian politicians, Alexander introduced a dictatorship with the aim of establishing the Yugoslav ideology and single Yugoslav nation.
The king abolished the Vidovdan Constitution, prorogued the National Assembly and introduced a personal dictatorship on 6 January 1929. The next day, general Petar Živković became prime minister, heading the regime's Yugoslav Radical Peasants' Democracy. On 11 January, the State Court for the Protection of the State was established in Belgrade.
The state was renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and was divided into new administrative divisions, called banovine. This decision was made following a proposal by the British ambassador to better decentralize the country, modeled on Czechoslovakia.
Continuing his efforts to unify his subjects, 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.
On 20 April, the Croatian fascist Ustaše and Macedonian secessionist IMRO called for the independence of Croatia and Macedonia. On 25 April, Đuro Đaković, a prominent unionist and the first secretary of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, was killed by Yugoslav policemen at the Yugoslav-Austrian border, Slovenia, after four days of torture and interrogation in a Zagreb police station. On 22 December, Croatian leader Vladko Maček was arrested.
After Alexander was assassinated, he was succeeded by the Yugoslav regency.