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Yugoslavia – Alexander I (Reigned 1914-1934)
1931 Silver 20 Dinara 31mm (13.89 grams) 0.500 Silver (0.2251 oz. ASW)
Reference: KM# 11
ALEKSANDAR I. KRALJ JUGOSLAVIJE
KOVNICA·A·D·, Effigy of King Aleksandar I facing left.
20 DINARA, Coat of arms of Yugoslavia, denomination below, year on either side.
You are bidding on the exact item pictured, provided with a Certificate of Authenticity and Lifetime Guarantee of Authenticity.
 Alexander I (16 December 1888 [O.S. 4 December] – 9 October 1934), also known as Alexander the Unifier, served as a prince regent of the Kingdom of Serbia from 1914 and later became King of Yugoslavia from 1921 to 1934 (prior to 1929 the state was known as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes). He was assassinated in Marseille, France, by Bulgarian terrorist Vlado Chernozemski during a state visit.
On 1 December 1918, in a prearranged set piece, Alexander, as Prince Regent, received a delegation of the People’s Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, an address was read out by one of the delegation, and Alexander made an address in acceptance. This was considered to be the birth of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. One of Alexander’s first acts as Prince Regent of the new kingdom was to declare his support for the widespread demand for land reform, stating: “In our free state ther can and will be only free landowners”. On 25 February 1919 Alexander signed a land reform degree breaking up all estates over the size of 100 cadastral yokes with compensation to be paid for the former landowners except for those who belonged to the House of Habsburg and the other ruling families of enemy states in the Great War. Under the land reform degree some two million hectares of land was handed over to half million peasant households, through the implementation was very slow, taking 15 years before land reform was complete. In both Macedonia and Bosnia-Hercegovina the majority of the landlords who lost land were Muslims while the majority of their former tenants who received the land were Christians, and in both places land reform was seen as an attack on the political and economic power of the Muslim gentry. In Croatia, Slovenia, and the Vojvodina, the majority of the landlords who lost their land were Austrian or Hungarian nobility who usually did not reside in those places, meaning that however much they might had resented the loss of their land did not have the sort of political repercussions as it did in Macedonia and in Bosnia where the Albanian and Bosnian Muslim landlords lived.
On 8 June 1922 he married Princess Maria of Romania, who was a daughter of King Ferdinand of the Romanians. They had three sons: Crown Prince Peter, and Princes Tomislav and Andrej. He was said to have wished to marry Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna of Russia, a cousin of his wife and the second daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, and was distraught by her untimely death in the Russian Civil War. The Russophile Alexander was horrified by the murders of the House of Romanov-including the Grand Duchess Tatiana who he had once hoped to marry-and during his reign was very hostile towards the Soviet Union, welcoming Russian emigres to Belgrade. The lavish royal wedding to Princess Maria of Romania was intended to cement the alliance with Romania, a fellow “victor nation” in World War I which like Yugoslavia had territorial disputes with the defeated nations like Hungary and Bulgaria. For Alexander, the royal wedding was especially satisfactory as most of the royal families of Europe attended, which showed that the House of Karađorđević, a family of peasant origins who were disliked for slaughtering the rival House of Obrenoviće in 1903, were finally accepted by the rest of European royalty.
Starting in 1926, an alliance of the Serb Democrats led by Svetozar Pribićević and the Croat Peasant Party led by Stjepan Radić had systematically obstructed the skupshtina to press for federalism for Yugoslavia, filibustering and filing nonsensical motions to prevent the government from passing any bills. In response to obstructionism from the opposition parties, in June 1928, one frustrated deputy from Montenegro took out his handgun and shot Radić on the floor of the skupshtina. The charismatic Radić, the “uncrowned king of Croatia”, had inspired intense devotion in Croatia and his assassination was seen as a sort of Serb declaration of war. The assassination pushed Yugoslavia to the brink of civil war and led Alexander to consider the “amputation” of Croatia as preferable to federalism. Alexander mused to Pribićević that: “We cannot stay together with the Croats. Since we cannot, it would be better to separate. The best way to be to effect a peaceful separation like Sweden and Norway did”. When Pribićević protested that this would be an act of “treason”, Alexander told him he would think some more about what to do. Alexander appointed the Slovene Catholic priest, Father Anton Korošec prime minister with one mandate, namely to stop the slide towards civil war. On December 1 1928, the lavish celebrations of the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Triune kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes that the government organized led to rioting that left 10 dead in Zagreb.
In 1931, Alexander decreed a new Constitution which transferred executive power to the King. 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. Furthermore, the King would appoint half of the upper house directly, and legislation could become law with the approval of one of the houses alone if it were also approved by the King. The 1931 constitution kept Yugoslavia as an unitary state, which enraged the non-Serbian peoples who demanded a federation and saw Alexander’s royal dictatorship as thinly disguised Serbian domination. In the elections for the skupshtina in December 1931-January 1932, the call of the opposition parties to boycott the vote were widely heeded, a sign of popular dissatisfaction with the new constitution.
In response to the impoverishment of the countryside caused by the Great Depression, Alexander reaffirmed in a speech that the right of every peasant family to a minimum amount of land that could not be seized by a bank in the event of a debt default, and in 1932 issued a decree suspending all debt payments by farmers to the banks for six months and forbade any more foreclosures by the banks against farmers. Through Alexander’s measures preventing the banks to foreclose on farmers who were unable to pay their loans saved many peasants from being ruined and prevented economic distress in the countryside from turning political, in the long run his policies did not solve the economic problems of the rural areas. The losses taken by the banks and their inability to foreclose on farmers who had delinquent loans made the banks unwilling to make new loans to the farmers. As Yugoslav agriculture, especially in the southern parts of the country was backward, the farmers needed loans to modernise their farms, but the unwillingness of the banks to lend to the farmers made modernisation of the farms impossible in the 1930s.
In September 1932, Alexander’s friend, the Croat politician Ante Trumbić gave an interview with The Manchester Guardian newspaper, where he stated that life for ordinary Croats was better when they were part of the Austrian empire and stated that perhaps the Croats would be better off if they broke away from Yugoslavia to form their own state. For Alexander, who always respected and liked Trumbić to see his former friend come very close to embracing Croat separatism was a painful blow. On 7 November 1932, Trumbić and Vladko Maček of the Croat Peasant Party issued the so-called Zagreb Points, which demanded a new constitution which would turn Yugoslavia into a federation, stating that otherwise the Croats would demand independence. Alexander had Maček imprisoned without charges, but the issuing of the Zagreb points inspired the other peoples to issue similar declarations with the Slovenes issuing the Ljubljana Points, the Bosnian Muslims issuing the Sarajevo Points and the Magyars issuing the Novi Sad points. The emergence of a multi-ethnic opposition movement embracing the non-Serb peoples threatened to break the country apart, and forced Alexander to ease the level of repression as his ministers warned him that he could not imprison the entire country. In Macedonia, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization was continuing its long-running guerrilla struggle while in Croatia the security situation had further deteriorated by 1932. By the end of 1932, the Ustashe had blown up hundreds of trains while assassinating hundreds of government officials. The often violent response of the mainly Serb gendarmes to Ustashe terrorism fueled more support for the Ustashe. To many, it appeared that Yugoslavia was sliding into the civil war that Alexander’s “self-coup” of January 1929 was supposed to prevent.
Starting in 1933, Alexander had become worried about Germany. In March 1933, the French minister in Belgrade, Paul-Émile Naggiar, told Alexander that France was seriously worried about the stability of Yugoslavia, warning that the king could not continue to rule in face of opposition from the majority of his subjects, and that the viewpoint from Paris was that Alexander was starting to become a liability for France. Naggiar predicated the new regime in Germany was going to challenge the international order created by the Treaty of Versailles sooner or later, and France needed Yugoslavia to be stable and strong, which led Naggiar to advise the king to adopt federalism for his realm. However, one point of agreement that Alexander did have with Mussolini was his fear of Anschluss, having no desire to have Germany as a neighbor, which led him to support the continuation of Austrian independence. Despite his distaste for communism, Alexander gave support, albeit in a very cautious and hesitant way, to the plans of the French foreign minister Louis Barthou to bring the Soviet Union into a front meant to contain Germany. In 1933-34, Alexander become the proponent of a Balkan Pact, which would unite Yugoslavia, Greece, Romania and Turkey. Through the Balkan Pact was primarily directed against Italy and its allies Hungary, Albania, and Bulgaria, Alexander also hoped the pact might provide some protection against Germany.
Yugoslavia (Serbo-Croatian: Jugoslavija/Југославија, Slovene: Jugoslavija, Macedonian: Југославија) was a country in Southeast Europe during most of the 20th century. It came into existence after World War I in 1918[i] under the name of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes by the merger of the provisional State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs (itself formed from territories of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire) with the formerly independent Kingdom of Serbia. The Serbian royal House of Karađorđević became the Yugoslav royal dynasty. Yugoslavia gained international recognition on 13 July 1922 at the Conference of Ambassadors in Paris.[2] The country was named after the South Slavic peoples and constituted their first union, following centuries in which the territories had been part of the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary.
Renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia on 3 October 1929, it was invaded by the Axis powers on 6 April 1941. In 1943, a Democratic Federal Yugoslavia was proclaimed by the Partisan resistance. In 1944, the king recognised it as the legitimate government, but in November 1945 the monarchy was abolished. Yugoslavia was renamed the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia in 1946, when a communist government was established. It acquired the territories of Istria, Rijeka, and Zadar from Italy. Partisan leader Josip Broz Tito ruled the country as president until his death in 1980. In 1963, the country was renamed again as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY).
The constituent six socialist republics that made up the country were the SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, SR Croatia, SR Macedonia, SR Montenegro, SR Serbia, and SR Slovenia. Serbia contained two Socialist Autonomous Provinces, Vojvodina and Kosovo, which after 1974 were largely equal to the other members of the federation. After an economic and political crisis in the 1980s and the rise of nationalism, Yugoslavia broke up along its republics’ borders, at first into five countries, leading to the Yugoslav Wars.
After the breakup, the republics of Serbia and Montenegro formed a reduced federation, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), which aspired to the status of sole legal successor to the SFRY, but those claims were opposed by the other former republics. Eventually, Serbia and Montenegro accepted the opinion of the Badinter Arbitration Committee about shared succession. Serbia and Montenegro themselves broke up in 2006 and became independent states, while Kosovo proclaimed independence in 2008.
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