The Sleepwalkers (4 page)

Petar I Karadjordjević

The pairing of rival dynasties, an exposed location between the Ottoman and the Austrian empires and a markedly undeferential political culture dominated by peasant smallholders: these factors in combination ensured that monarchy remained an embattled institution. It is striking how few of the nineteenth-century Serbian regents died on the throne of natural causes. The principality's founder, Prince Miloš Obrenović, was a brutal autocrat whose reign was scarred by frequent rebellions. In the summer of 1839, Miloš abdicated in favour of his eldest son, Milan, who was so ill with the measles that he was still unaware of his elevation when he died thirteen days later. The reign of the younger son, Mihailo, came to a premature halt when he was deposed by a rebellion in 1842, making way for the installation of a Karadjordjević – none other than Alexandar, the son of ‘Black George'. But in 1858, Alexandar, too, was forced to abdicate, to be succeeded again by Mihailo, who returned to the throne in 1860. Mihailo was no more popular during his second reign than he had been during the first; eight years later he was assassinated, together with a female cousin, in a plot that may have been supported by the Karadjordjević clan.

The long reign of Mihailo's successor, Prince Milan Obrenović (1868–89), provided a degree of political continuity. In 1882, four years after the Congress of Berlin had accorded Serbia the status of an independent state, Milan proclaimed it a kingdom and himself king. But high levels of political turbulence remained a problem. In 1883, the government's efforts to decommission the firearms of peasant militias in north-eastern Serbia triggered a major provincial uprising, the Timok rebellion. Milan responded with brutal reprisals against the rebels and a witch-hunt against senior political figures in Belgrade suspected of having fomented the unrest.

Serbian political culture was transformed in the early 1880s by the emergence of political parties of the modern type with newspapers, caucuses, manifestos, campaign strategies and local committees. To this formidable new force in public life the king responded with autocratic measures. When elections in 1883 produced a hostile majority in the Serbian parliament (known as the Skupština), the king refused to appoint a government recruited from the dominant Radical Party, choosing instead to assemble a cabinet of bureaucrats. The Skupština was opened by decree and then closed again by decree ten minutes later. A disastrous war against Bulgaria in 1885 – the result of royal executive decisions made without any consultation either with ministers or with parliament – and an acrimonious and scandalous divorce from his wife, Queen Nathalie, further undermined the monarch's standing. When Milan abdicated in 1889 (in the hope, among other things, of marrying the pretty young wife of his personal secretary), his departure seemed long overdue.

The regency put in place to manage Serbian affairs during the minority of Milan's son, Crown Prince Alexandar, lasted four years. In 1893, at the age of only sixteen, Alexandar overthrew the regency in a bizarre coup d'état: the cabinet ministers were invited to dinner and cordially informed in the course of a toast that they were all under arrest; the young king announced that he intended to arrogate to himself ‘full royal power'; key ministerial buildings and the telegraph administration had already been occupied by the military.
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The citizens of Belgrade awoke on the following morning to find the city plastered with posters announcing that Alexandar had seized power.

In reality, ex-King Milan was still managing events from behind the scenes. It was Milan who had set up the regency and it was Milan who engineered the coup on behalf of his son. In a grotesque family manoeuvre for which it is hard to find any contemporary European parallel, the abdicated father served as chief adviser to the royal son. During the years 1897–1900, this arrangement was formalized in the ‘Milan–Alexander duarchy'. ‘King Father Milan' was appointed supreme commander of the Serbian army, the first civilian ever to hold this office.

During Alexandar's reign, the history of the Obrenović dynasty entered its terminal phase. Supported from the sidelines by his father, Alexandar quickly squandered the hopeful goodwill that often attends the inauguration of a new regime. He ignored the relatively liberal provisions of the Serbian constitution, imposing instead a form of neo-absolutist rule: secret ballots were eliminated, press freedoms were rescinded, newspapers were closed down. When the leadership of the Radical Party protested, they found themselves excluded from the exercise of power. Alexandar abolished, imposed and suspended constitutions in the manner of a tinpot dictator. He showed no respect for the independence of the judiciary, and even plotted against the lives of senior politicians. The spectacle of the king and King Father Milan recklessly operating the levers of the state in tandem – not to mention Queen Mother Nathalie, who remained an important figure behind the scenes, despite the breakdown of her marriage with Milan – had a devastating impact on the standing of the dynasty.

Alexandar's decision to marry the disreputable widow of an obscure engineer did nothing to improve the situation. He had met Draga Mašin in 1897, when she was serving as a maid of honour to his mother. Draga was ten years older than the king, unpopular with Belgrade society, widely believed to be infertile and well known for her allegedly numerous sexual liaisons. During a heated meeting of the Crown Council, when ministers attempted in vain to dissuade the king from marrying Mašin, the interior minister Djordje Genčić came up with a powerful argument: ‘Sire, you cannot marry her. She has been everybody's mistress – mine included.' The minister's reward for his candour was a hard slap across the face – Genčić would later join the ranks of the regicide conspiracy.
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There were similar encounters with other senior officials.
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At one rather overwrought cabinet meeting, the acting prime minister even proposed placing the king under palace arrest or having him bundled out of the country by force in order to prevent the union from being solemnized.
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So intense was the opposition to Mašin among the political classes that the king found it impossible for a time to recruit suitable candidates into senior posts; the news of Alexandar and Draga's engagement alone was enough to trigger the resignation of the entire cabinet and the king was obliged to make do with an eclectic ‘wedding cabinet' of little-known figures.

The controversy over the marriage also strained the relationship between the king and his father. Milan was so outraged at the prospect of Draga's becoming his daughter-in-law that he resigned his post as commander-in-chief of the army. In a letter written to his son in June 1900, he declared that Alexandar was ‘pushing Serbia into an abyss' and closed with a forthright warning: ‘I shall be the first to cheer the government which shall drive you from the country, after such a folly on your part.'
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Alexandar went ahead just the same with his plan (he and Draga were married on 23 June 1900 in Belgrade) and exploited the opportunity created by his father's resignation to reinforce his own control over the officer corps. There was a purge of Milan's friends (and Draga's enemies) from senior military and civil service posts; the King Father was kept under constant surveillance, then encouraged to leave Serbia and later prevented from returning. It was something of a relief to the royal couple when Milan, who had settled in Austria, died in January 1901.

King Alexandar and Queen Draga
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. 1900

There was a brief revival in the monarch's popularity late in 1900, when an announcement by the palace that the queen was expecting a child prompted a wave of public sympathy. But the outrage was correspondingly intense in April 1901 when it was revealed that Draga's pregnancy had been a ruse designed to placate public opinion (rumours spread in the capital of a foiled plan to establish a ‘suppositious infant' as heir to the Serbian throne). Ignoring these ill omens, Alexandar launched a propaganda cult around his queen, celebrating her birthday with lavish public events and naming regiments, schools and even villages after her. At the same time, his constitutional manipulations became bolder. On one famous occasion in March 1903, the king suspended the Serbian constitution in the middle of the night while repressive new press and association laws were hurried on to the statute books, and then reinstated it just forty-five minutes later.

By the spring of 1903, Alexandar and Draga had united most of Serbian society against them. The Radical Party, which had won an absolute majority of Skupština seats in the elections of July 1901, resented the king's autocratic manipulations. Among the powerful mercantile and banking families (especially those involved in the export of livestock and foodstuffs) there were many who saw the pro-Vienna bias of Obrenović foreign policy as locking the Serbian economy into an Austrian monopoly and depriving the country's capitalists of access to world markets.
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On 6 April 1903, a demonstration in Belgrade decrying the king's constitutional manipulations was brutally dispersed by police and gendarmes, who killed eighteen and wounded about fifty others.
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Over one hundred people – including a number of army officers – were arrested and imprisoned, though most were freed after a few days.

At the epicentre of the deepening opposition to the crown was the Serbian army. By the turn of the twentieth century, the army was one of the most dynamic institutions in Serbian society. In a still largely rural and underperforming economy, where careers offering upward mobility were hard to come by, an officer commission was a privileged route to status and influence. This pre-eminence had been reinforced by King Milan, who lavished funding on the military, expanding the officer corps while cutting back the state's already meagre expenditure on higher education. But the fat years came to an abrupt end after the King Father's departure in 1900: Alexandar pruned back the military budget, officers' salaries were allowed to fall months into arrears, and a policy of court favouritism ensured that friends or relatives of the king and his wife were promoted to key posts over the heads of their colleagues. These resentments were sharpened by the widespread belief – despite official denials – that the king, having failed to generate a biological heir, was planning to designate Queen Draga's brother Nikodije Lunjevica as successor to the Serbian throne.
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During the summer of 1901, a military conspiracy crystallized around a gifted young lieutenant of the Serbian army who would play an important role in the events of July 1914. Later known as ‘Apis', because his heavy build reminded his admirers of the broad-shouldered bull-god of ancient Egypt, Dragutin Dimitrijević had been appointed to a post on the General Staff immediately after his graduation from the Serbian Military Academy, a sure sign of the great esteem in which he was held by his superiors. Dimitrijević was made for the world of political conspiracy. Obsessively secretive, utterly dedicated to his military and political work, ruthless in his methods and icily composed in moments of crisis, Apis was not a man who could have held sway over a great popular movement. But he did possess in abundance the capacity, within small groups and private circles, to win and groom disciples, to confer a sense of importance upon his following, to silence doubts and to motivate extreme action.
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One collaborator described him as ‘a secret force at whose disposal I have to place myself, though my reason gives me no grounds for doing so'. Another of the regicides puzzled over the reasons for Apis's influence: neither his intelligence, nor his eloquence, nor the force of his ideas seemed sufficient to account for it; ‘yet he was the only one among us who solely by his presence was able to turn my thoughts into his stream and with a few words spoken in the most ordinary manner could make out of me an obedient executor of his will'.
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The milieu in which Dimitrijević deployed these gifts was emphatically masculine. Women were a marginal presence in his adult life; he never showed any sexual interest in them. His natural habitat, and the scene of all his intrigues, was the smoke-filled, men-only world of the Belgrade coffee-houses – a space at once private and public, where conversations could be seen without necessarily being heard. The best-known surviving photograph of him depicts the burly moustachioed intriguer with two associates in a characteristically conspiratorial pose.