failed assassination attempt by the Damjan Arnautović in 1935. The Regent for the boy king Peter II, the Prince Regent Paul, appointed Stojadinović Prime Minister partly because he was regarded as a financial expert who would deal with the effects of the Great Depression, and partly because Stojadinović was believed to be capable of making a deal with the Croat politicians to resolve the thorny question over whether Yugoslavia was to be a federation or a unitary state. One of Stojadinović's first acts was to loosen censorship on the press and to free 10,000 political prisoners. Through the JRZ Stojadinović had a submissive skupshtina (parliament), but the JRZ never became the mass movement that Stojadinović had envisioned. Domestic issues The British historian Richard Crampton wrote that the basis of Stojadinović's power rested on "political jobbery" and corruption as the JRZ functioned more as a patronage machine of a type very common to the Balkans rather than the fascistic mass movement that Stojadinović had intended. Interwar Yugoslavia was characterized by an etatist economic system with the state playing a very large role in the economy. The Yugoslav state owned all or most of the railroads, docks, mines, steel mills, forests, mills, hospitals, banks, publishing houses, hotels, theatres and opera houses in the country, together with the state having monopolies over the manufacturing, distribution and sales of matches, salt, cigarette paper, tobacco and kerosene. As the public sector jobs paid considerably better than the private sector, and there were more opportunities for corruption, there was much competition for jobs in the public sector, especially in a country as poor as Yugoslavia, meaning whatever government that was in power in Belgrade could build much support by operating a patronage machine which would hand out public sector jobs in exchange for votes. Every government in interwar Yugoslavia used the powers of patronage to reward its supporters with public sector jobs and punish its enemies by denying them the chance to work in the public sector. Stojadinović, like his predecessors, created a patronage machine as the basis of his power with JRZ members being rewarded with employment in the public sector. However, the gradual improvement of the Yugoslav economy in the late 1930s after the nadir it had fallen to in 1932, the worst year of the Great Depression, did win Stojadinović a measure of popularity. Stojadinović believed that the solution to the Great Depression