Vladimir Danchev

Who is 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 May 23, 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. Danchev was subsequently temporarily removed from the air and sent to a psychiatric hospital. He was praised in the U.S. media as a hero of free speech and free thought.