Vladimir Danchev

Vladimir Danchev was a newscaster at Soviet radio in Moscow, who is famous for calling on the Afghan people to resist the Soviet invasion of their country on 23 May 1983. His controversial encouragement of armed resistance against the Russian military outraged many of his countrymen. However, according to the American political analyst Noam Chomsky and other commentators, his principal transgression was that he embarrassed the Soviet government by contradicting their official ideology, by describing the presence of Soviet forces in Afghanistan as an “invasion.” According to the party line, Russia was not invading Afghanistan; it was defending the Afghan people against terrorists who were funded by foreign sources (the USSR was referring to the Mujahedin and the CIA). Danchev was subsequently sent to a psychiatric hospital and returned to work in December 1983. He was praised in the U.S. media as a hero of free speech and free thought. Danchev was of Russian and Bulgarian descent and grew up in Tashkent, Uzbek SSR.