Pavel Shatev

Pavel Potsev Shatev (Bulgarian and Macedonian: Павел Поцев Шатев; July 15, 1882 – January 30, 1951) was a socialist revolutionary from Macedonia[1] and member of the left wing of the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization (IMARO), later becoming a left-wing political activist. He was jailed in post-WWII SR Macedonia as an enemy of the state.[2] He is considered a Macedonian in the Macedonian historiography[3] and as a Bulgarian in the Bulgarian historiography.[4] However such activists who came from the IMRO (United) maintained their strong pro-Bulgarian bias,[5] and according to Ivan Katardžiev they continued to see themselves as Bulgarians, even in Communist Yugoslavia.[6]

Pavel Potsev Shatev
Born(1882-07-15)July 15, 1882
Kratovo, Ottoman Empire
DiedJanuary 30, 1951(1951-01-30) (aged 68)
Bitola, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
OrganizationIMRO (United)
Known forThessaloniki bombings of 1903
Notable work"In Macedonia under yoke" (1934)

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.[7]

In 1908, after the Young Turks revolution, Shatev was given amnesty, went to Bulgaria and 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.[8]

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.[9] 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. Nevertheless, such Macedonian activists, who came from the IMRO (United) and the Bulgarian Communist Party never managed to get rid of their bulgarophile bias.[10]

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.[11]

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.[12] He was later jailed for his pro-Bulgarian and anti-Yugoslav sympathies.[13]

Literature

Further reading
  • Shopov, Aleksandar (2019). "'Fezzan is the Siberia of Africa': Desert and Society in the Prison Memoir of Pavel Shatev (1882–1951), An Anarchist from Ottoman Macedonia". Global Environment. 12 (1): 237–253. ISSN 1973-3739.

References
  1. Balázs Trencsényi; Maciej Janowski; Monika Baár; Michal Kopeček; Maria Falina; Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič (2016). A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe. Oxford University Press. p. 110.
  2. Anastas Vangeli, Facing the Yugoslav Communist Past in Contemporary Macedonia: Tales of Continuity, Nostalgia and Victimization; pp. 183-205 in Politics of Memory in Post-Communist Europe, with ed. Corina Dobos and Marius Stan, Volume 1; Zeta Books, 2011, ISBN 9731997865, p. 201.
  3. Пачемска, Даринка. Внатрешната македонска револуционерна организација (обединета). Новинско-издавачка организација 'Студентски збор'. p. 72.
  4. Tonchev, Tenʹo (1985). Кавалери на сабята и перото. Воен. изд-во. p. 139.
  5. Palmer, S. and R. King Yugoslav Communism and the Macedonian Question, Archon Books (June 1971), p. 137.
  6. According to the Macedonian historian Academician Ivan Katardzhiev all left-wing Macedonian revolutionaries from the period until the early 1930s declared themselves as "Bulgarians" and he asserts that the political separatism of some Macedonian revolutionaties toward official Bulgarian policy was yet only political phenomenon without ethnic character. Katardzhiev claims all those veterans from IMRO (United) and Bulgarian communist party remained only at the level of political, not of national separatism. Thus, they practically continued to feel themselves as Bulgarians, i.e. they didn't developed clear national separatist position even in Communist Yugoslavia. This will bring even one of them - Dimitar Vlahov on the session of the Politburo of the Macedonian communist party in 1948, to say that in 1932 (when left wing of IMRO issued for the first time the idea of separate Macedonian nation) a mistake was made. Академик Катарџиев, Иван. Верувам во националниот имунитет на македонецот, интервју за списание "Форум", 22 jули 2000, броj 329.
  7. Keith Brown (2013). Loyal Unto Death: Trust and Terror in Revolutionary Macedonia. Indiana University Press. pp. 65–66. ISBN 9780253008473.
  8. Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Macedonia, Dimitar Bechev, Scarecrow Press, 2009, ISBN 0810862956, pp. 199-200.
  9. We, the people: politics of national peculiarity in Southeastern Europe, Diana Mishkova, Central European University Press, 2009, ISBN 963-9776-28-9, p. 130.
  10. Palmer, S. and R. King Yugoslav Communism and the Macedonian Question, Archon Books (June 1971), p. 137.
  11. Катарџиев, Иван. Васил Ивановски - живот и дело, предговор кон: Ивановски, Васил. Зошто ние Македонците сме одделна нација, Избрани дела, Скопје, 1995, стр. 50.
  12. After the annihilation of the pro-Bulgarian right-wing elements after 1945, the Yugoslav authorities concentrated their attention on communists with a Bulgarian past and pro-Bulgarian comments. One such was Venko Markovski, who dared to oppose Koneski's ideas on the Serbianization of the Macedonian language. Others were Panko Brashnarov and Pavel Shatev, who wrote letters to Georgi Dimitrov and Stalin to complain about Tito and to ask for help in maintaining the Bulgarian character of Macedonia. Another was Metodija Andonov- Cento, who became the first president of the Yugoslav People's Republic of Macedonia and demanded a united and independent Macedonia outside Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav communists created special gulags in Idrizovo, near Skopje and Goli Otok, a barren island in Croatia, where they sent such pro-Bulgarian or pro-Macedonian independence agitators. For more see: Contested Ethnic Identity: The Case of Macedonian Immigrants in Toronto, 1900-1996, Chris Kostov, Peter Lang, 2010, ISBN 3-0343-0196-0, p. 88.
  13. Macedonia's child-grandfathers: the transnational politics of memory, exile, and return, 1948-1998, Author Keith Brown, Publisher Henry M. Jackson, University of Washington, 2003 p. 33.
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