Zivkovic lost no time in disbanding all political parties and (elected) municipalities. He embarked upon an endless string of show trials of opponents of his dictatorship, communists and anti- monarchists. He introduced a one-party, government-controlled electoral system. Thus, in an ironic twist of history, the Black Hand came to its own, after all. One of its former members a Prime Minister, a dictator, under a king installed by its slaughterous coup. Black Hand or White Hand - the means disputed, the ends were always in consensus. A Great Serbia for the Great Serbian people. Return The Insurgents and the Swastika "Even going back ten years it was easy to see something gripping Yugoslavia by the throat. But in the years since then the grip has been tightened, and tightened in my opinion by the dictatorship established by King Alexander Karageorgevitch. This dictatorship, however much it may claim a temporary success, must inevitably have the effect of poisoning all the Yugoslav organism. Whether the poisoning is incurable or not is the question for which I have sought an answer during two months in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and central Europe." "Black Hand over Europe" by Henri Pozzi, 1935 THE SIN Yugoslavia was born in sin and in sin it perished. The King of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, Alexander I, a freshly self-proclaimed dictator, declared it on October 1929. It was a union of East and West, the Orthodox and the Catholic, Ottoman residues with Austro- Hungarian structures, the heart and the mind. Inevitably, it stood no chance. The Croats and the Slovenes - formerly fiery proponents of a Yugo (Southern) Slav federation - were mortified to find themselves in a Serb-dominated "Third World", Byzantine polity.