Pavel Shatev

Pavel Potsev Shatev (Bulgarian and Павел Поцев Шатев; July 15, 1882 – January 30, 1951) was a socialist revolutionary from Macedonia and member of the left wing of the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization (IMARO), later becoming a left-wing political activist.

Biography
Born in Kratovo, in the Kosovo vilayet of the Ottoman Empire (present-day North Macedonia), Shatev graduated from the Bulgarian Men's High School of Thessaloniki. At first, he participated in a group that made plans for a bomb attack in Istanbul. In 1900 the Ottoman police arrested the whole group, including Shatev. In 1901 the prisoners were deported το Bulgaria, after pressure from the Bulgarian government, where they consulted with members of a small anarchist group in Salonika, who agreed to blow up the local branch of the Ottoman Bank. In late April 1903, together with a group of young anarchists from the Boatmen of Thessaloniki, he then launched a campaign of terror bombing known as the Thessaloniki bombings of 1903.

In 1908, after the Young Turks revolution, Shatev was given amnesty and went to Bulgaria, where he graduated in law at Sofia University. In the next few years, he worked as a teacher and journalist. In 1912 Shatev was appointed a teacher at Thessaloniki Bulgarian Men's High School. He participated as a Bulgarian soldier in the First World War. During the 1920s Shatev became a member of the Macedonian Federative Organisation but after the coup in 1923, he emigrated from Sofia to Vienna. Here he get in contact with the Soviet Embassy and was recruited as a Soviet spy and Comintern activist. In the early 1930s, he went back to Bulgaria and worked as a lawyer and publicist. Shatev was among those who emphasised the national character of the Macedonians in writings for IMRO (United). He described Macedonians as having their own history, politics, and culture, though without regard to "confession and nationality". After the beginning of World War II, he was engaged in communist conspiracy. As this was considered a political offence, he was arrested in Sofia and sentenced to 15 years of prison.

After the end of the war, Shatev was released and took part in the creation of the new People's Republic of Macedonia as a member of ASNOM. He was elected Minister of Justice in the first communist government and later became vice-chairman of the Presidium of ASNOM. After the first elections for parliament, Shatev became a deputy.

Meanwhile, from the start of the new Yugoslavia, the authorities organised frequent purges and trials of Macedonian communists and non-party people charged with autonomist deviation. Many of the former left-wing IMRO government officials were purged from their positions, then isolated, arrested, imprisoned or executed on various charges such as demands for greater independence of Yugoslav Macedonia, collaboration with the Cominform after the Tito–Stalin split in 1948. In 1946 Shatev wrote a complaint to the Bulgarian embassy in Belgrade, in which he argued that the new Macedonian language is Serbianized and the use of Bulgarian language is prohibited in Macedonia and required the intervention of the Bulgarian leader Georgi Dimitrov.

In 1948, fully disappointed with the policy of the new Yugoslav authorities, Shatev, together with Panko Brashnarov, complained in letters to Joseph Stalin and to Georgi Dimitrov and asked for help, maintaining better relations with Bulgaria and the Soviet Union. According to British sources, he later tried to negotiate with the Bulgarian authorities the frontiers of PR Macedonia, independently from Belgrade. In Sofia, Shatev appealed to the secretary of CC of BCP Traycho Kostov, with a request to intercede against the anti-Bulgarian policy of the Yugoslav authorities.

He was later jailed for his alleged pro-Bulgarian and anti-Yugoslav sympathies. Shatev was detained in Skopje prison for 11 months, and then interned in Bitola, where he was kept under house arrest until his death. Afterwards, his personality became a taboo in SFR Yugoslavia.

Legacy
The tragic fate of Shatev was well exploited by the Bulgarian historians during the Communist era in favor of their cause in Macedonia. After the break-up of Yugoslavia he was rehabilitated in the new Republic of Macedonia as an unjustly accused of Bulgarophilia by the Titoist regime and a Macedonian patriot. Although today Shatev is considered a Macedonian by the Macedonian historiography, per Macedonian researcher Anastas Vangeli, he identified himself as Bulgarian. In North Macedonia, he was praised as a hero of the political right during the 2010s. In 2008, VMRO-DPMNE established a conservative institute bearing his name. In 2010, the government erected a monument of him and his terrorist group.

Literature

 * "В Македония под Робство; Солунското Съзаклятие (1903 г.), Подготовка и Изпълнение" "In Macedonia under Slavery", first edition of the popular Pavel Shatev book.
 * "Бележки върху Българската Просвета в Македония", публикувана в "Сборник Солун", София 1934 година Pavel Shatev on the Bulgarian enlightenment in Macedonia and the last days of the Bulgarian schools in Salonica.