Vladimir Danchev

Vladimir Danchev (, born 1948) is a former Russian newscaster at the foreign broadcasting service of Soviet radio in Moscow, who changed the English texts he was given to read in 1983, to express support for the Afghan people in their resistance to Soviet armed forces in their country.

Of mixed Russian-Bulgarian descent, Danchev refused to repent his actions and was subsequently sent to a psychiatric hospital in Tashkent, the city where he had grown up. According to official ideology, the USSR had not invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. It was defending the Afghan people against "terrorists funded by foreign sources": this was how the USSR referred to the Mujahedin and their backers in the CIA and Saudi Arabia.

Danchev was praised at the time in the U.S. media as a hero of free speech and free thought and in 1991 the International Federation of Human Rights inaugurated an award for journalists in his name.