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.

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.

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.

[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.

[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.

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.