Pavel Shatev - The Earlier Years

The Earlier Years

Born in Kratovo, then in the Ottoman Empire, today in Macedonia, Shatev graduated from the Bulgarian Men's High School of Thessaloniki. In late April 1903, together with a group of young anarchists from the Gemidzhii Circle, he launched a campaign of terror bombing known as the Thessaloniki bombings of 1903. He used dynamite to blow up the French ship "Guadalquivir" which was leaving Thessaloniki harbour. He was captured and sentenced to death, but later his sentence was changed to life imprisonment in Fezzan in modern day Libya. In 1908, after the Young Turks revolution, Shatev was amnested, went to Bulgaria and graduated in law at Sofia University. In the next few years he worked as a teacher and journalist. In 1925, Shatev was one of the founders of Comintern IMRO (United) in Vienna. In the 1930s, he went back to Bulgaria and worked as a lawyer and publicist. In 1934, the Balkan Secretariat of the Comintern issued a resolution for the recognition of Macedonian ethnicity.