Editing Alexander I of Yugoslavia (section)

===King of Yugoslavia===
In August 1921, on the death of his father, Alexander inherited the throne of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which from its inception was colloquially known both in the Kingdom and the rest of Europe alike as Yugoslavia.

On 8 June 1922 he married Princess Maria of Romania, who was a daughter of Ferdinand I of Romania. 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.

In response to the political crisis triggered by the assassination of Stjepan Radić, King Alexander abolished the Constitution on 6 January 1929, prorogued the Parliament and introduced a personal dictatorship (the so-called "January 6th Dictatorship"). One of the first acts of the new regime was to carry out a purge of the civil service with one-third of the civil service being fired by May 1929 in an attempt to address popular complaints about rampant corruption in the bureaucracy. He also changed the name of the country to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and changed the internal divisions from the 33 ''oblasts'' to nine new ''banovinas'' on 3 October. Of the ''banovinas'', only one had a Slovene majority, two had Croat majorities and the rest had Serb majorities, which especially angered the Bosnian Muslims who were in a minority in every ''banovine''. The way in which the banovinas were based on new borders that did not correspond to the historical regional borders led to much resentment, especially in Bosnia and Croatia. The banovinas were named after the topography of Yugoslavia rather than the historical names in a bid to weaken regional loyalties, being governed by ''bans'' appointed by the King.

In the same month, he tried to banish by decree the use of Serbian Cyrillic to promote the exclusive use of the Latin alphabet in Yugoslavia. Alexander replaced the three regional flags for the Triune kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes with a single flag for the entire country, brought in a single legal code for his realm, imposed a single fiscal code so all of his subjects would pay the same tax rate, and an Yugoslav Agrarian Bank was created by merging all of the regional agrarian banks into one. Alexander tried to promote a sense of Yugoslav identity by always taking his vacations in Slovenia, naming his second son after a Croat king, and being a godfather to a Bosnian Muslim child. Alexander had once fraternized frequently with ordinary people, being known for his habit of making unannounced visits to various villages all over Yugoslavia to chat with ordinary people. But after the proclamation of the royal dictatorship, his social circle consisted of a few generals and courtiers, causing the King to lose touch with his subjects.

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 ''skupština'' 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.