King Alexander I was a good and worthy man forced by circumstances into the role of an abhorrent tyrant. He was a great believer in the power of symbols and education. He changed the name of his loose confederacy into a stricter "Yugoslavia". In an attempt to defuse internal divisions, he appealed to natural features (like rivers and mountains) as internal borders. Croatia vanished as a political entity, replaced by naturally-bounded districts and provinces. The majority of Croats still believed in a federal solution, albeit less Serb-biased. They believed in reform from the inside. The Ustashe and Pavelic were always a minority, the Bolsheviks of Croatia. But King Alexander's authoritarian rule was hard to ignore: the torture of political opponents and their execution, the closure of patriotic sports societies, the flagrant interference in the work of the ostensibly independent judiciary, the censorship. There was bad blood growing between the King and more of his subjects by the day. The Croats were not the only "minority" to be thus maltreated. The Serbs maintained an armed presence in Macedonia, Kosovo, the Sandzak and even in Slovenia. They deported thousands of "Turks" (actually, all manner of Muslims) under the guise of a "re-patriation" scheme. They confiscated land from religious institutions, from the deportees, from big landowners, from the Magyars in Vojvodina and "re-distributed" it to the Serbs. Ethnic homogenization (later to become known as "ethnic cleansing") was common practise in that era. The Turks, the Bulgars, the Germans, the Greeks were all busily purifying the ethnic composition of their lands. But it made the King and the Serbs no friends. The Serbs seemed to have been bent on isolating themselves from within and on transforming their Yugo Slav brethren into sworn adversaries. This was true in the economic sphere as well as in the political realm. Serbia declared a "Danubian orientation" (in lieu of the "Adriatic orientation") which benefited the economies of central and northern Serbia at the expense of Croatia and Slovenia. While Serbia was being industrialized and its agriculture reformed, Croatia and Slovenia did not share in the spoils of war, the reparations that Yugoslavia received from the Central Powers. Yugoslavia was protectionist which went against the interest of its trading compatriots. When war reparations ceased (1931) and Germany's economy evaporated, Yugoslavia was hurled into the economic crisis the world has been experiencing since 1929. The Nazi induced recovery of Germany drew in Yugoslavia and its firms. It was granted favourable export conditions by Hitler's Germany and many of its companies participated in cartels established by German corporate giants. King Alexander I must have known he would be assassinated. Someone tried to kill him as he was taking the oath to uphold the constitution on June 28, 1921. For 8 long years he had to endure a