Pavel Shatev

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Pavel Potsev Shatev (July 15, 1882 – January 30, 1951) was a Bulgarian‑Macedonian revolutionary, lawyer and teacher. He belonged to the left wing of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) and to the anarchist group Boatmen of Thessaloniki. In 1903 he took part in the Thessaloniki bombings, detonating dynamite on the French ship Guadalquivir; all aboard survived. He was arrested, sentenced to death, but the sentence was later changed to life in prison and he was sent to exile in Murzuk, Fezzan. He was amnestied after the Young Turk Revolution in 1908. He studied law, worked as a teacher, and in 1910 published his prison memoir in Sofia.

During and after World War I he worked with Soviet intelligence. After World War II, he became Minister of Justice in the first communist government of Democratic Federal Macedonia (1945). Following the Tito–Stalin split, he was persecuted by Yugoslav authorities and spent his final years under house arrest in Bitola, where he died in 1951. His legacy is debated: in North Macedonia he is praised as a patriot, while other accounts emphasize his revolutionary and pro‑Soviet ties. His memoirs were published in Macedonian in 1994.