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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.

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
NationalityOttoman, Bulgarian, Yugoslav
OrganizationIMRO (United)
Known forThessaloniki bombings of 1903
Notable work"In Macedonia under yoke" (1934)
"Thessalonica bombings and the exiles in Fezzan", based on the memoirs of Pavel Shatev, published in 1927 in Sofia by the Macedonian Scientific Institute.

Biography

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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.[2]

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.[3] 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", not as ethnic Macedonians.[4]

 
Appeal to the Macedonians in Bulgaria during WW2, one of the signatures was Pavel Shatev himself.[5]

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.[6] 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.[7] 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.[8]

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.[9] According to British sources, he later tried to negotiate with the Bulgarian authorities the frontiers of PR Macedonia, independently from Belgrade.[10] 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.[11]

He was later jailed for his alleged pro-Bulgarian and anti-Yugoslav sympathies.[12] 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.[13][14]

Legacy

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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.[15] Although today Shatev is considered a Macedonian by the Macedonian historiography,[16] per Macedonian researcher Anastas Vangeli, he identified himself as Bulgarian.[17] 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.[17]

Literature

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Further reading

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  • 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

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  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. ^ Keith Brown (2013). Loyal Unto Death: Trust and Terror in Revolutionary Macedonia. Indiana University Press. pp. 65–66. ISBN 9780253008473.
  3. ^ Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Macedonia, Dimitar Bechev, Scarecrow Press, 2009, ISBN 0810862956, pp. 199-200.
  4. ^ Alexis Heraclides (2021). The Macedonian Question And The Macedonians. Taylor & Francis. p. 76.
  5. ^ Vasilev Bili︠a︡rski, Iva Burilkova (1999). BKP, the Comintern and the Macedonian Question (1917-1946). Glavno upravlenie na arkhivite. p. 1122. ISBN 9549800040.
  6. ^ We, the people: politics of national peculiarity in Southeastern Europe, Diana Mishkova, Central European University Press, 2009, ISBN 963-9776-28-9, p. 130.
  7. ^ Rae, Heather. “State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples.” (2002) Cambridge University Pressq ISBN 9780521797085, pp. 277-278.
  8. ^ Катарџиев, Иван. Васил Ивановски - живот и дело, предговор кон: Ивановски, Васил. Зошто ние Македонците сме одделна нација, Избрани дела, Скопје, 1995, стр. 50.
  9. ^ "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 Yugoslav People's Republic of Macedonia president 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.
  10. ^ Livanios, D. (2008). The Macedonian Question: Britain and the Southern Balkans 1939-1949. United Kingdom: OUP Oxford. ISBN 9780191528729, p. 208.
  11. ^ Dimitar Gotsev, The new national-liberation struggle in Vardar Macedonia, 1944-1991. Macedonian Scientific Institute, Sofia 1999. p. 17.
  12. ^ 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.
  13. ^ Stefan Troebst, “Historical Politics and Historical 'Masterpieces' in Macedonia before and after 1991”, New Balkan Politics, 6 (2000/1).
  14. ^ "The historian Vlado Ivanoski, director of the Institute of National History between 1987 and 1995, in his speech of welcome to the 1992 conference dedicated to the life of Pavel Šatev, said this: "The new democratic environment, for the first time, enables us to explicitly address and discuss Šatev’s life and time, along with many other problems of Macedonian history. Two or three years ago it was simply impossible to do this. If someone tried to mention these issues and personalities, even at closed sessions, it was considered a “sin” and was sanctioned." Stefoska, Irena and Stojanov, Darko. "Remembering and forgetting the SFR Yugoslavia. Historiography and history textbooks in the Republic of Macedonia" Comparative Southeast European Studies, vol. 64, no. 2, 2016, pp. 206-225. https://doi.org/10.1515/soeu-2016-0016
  15. ^ Marinov, Tchavdar. “Historiographical Revisionism and Re-Articulation of Memory in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.” (2010), pp. 5–6; 10.
  16. ^ Пачемска, Даринка. Внатрешната македонска револуционерна организација (обединета). Новинско-издавачка организација 'Студентски збор'. p. 72.
  17. ^ a b Anastas Vangeli, Facing the Yugoslav Communist Past in Contemporary Macedonia: Tales of Continuity, Nostalgia and Victimization; p. 201 in Politics of Memory in Post-Communist Europe, with ed. Corina Dobos and Marius Stan, Volume 1; Zeta Books, 2011, ISBN 9731997865, p. 201.
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