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In 1956, the Eurovision Song Contest—a televised European, well, song contest—debuted in Switzerland. The event grew out of a similar competition in Italy as well as an emerging union—and content-sharing push—among Europe’s public service broadcasters as the continent healed following the ravages of the Second World War. It would go on to bear witness to bona fide music history: in 1974, ABBA got their big break when they won with “Waterloo” in the English seaside city of Brighton; ditto Céline Dion, who won for Switzerland, in 1988, with “Ne partez pas sans moi.” In more recent times, however, the content has been less memorable for the songs—which are sometimes passable, often terrible, and occasionally truly unhinged—than its reliable, high-camp sense of spectacle. (Eurovision has yet to really catch on in the US, though it is a reliable subject of curiosity for the American press and inspired a decent Will Ferrell movie, in 2020, as well as an American Song Contest on NBC, in 2022, which was hosted by Snoop Dogg and Kelly Clarkson, and took the form of a battle between states. The show petered out, but not without bequeathing the insanely catchy Wyoming entry “New Boot Goofin’.”) 

Eurovision presents as a glossy annual celebration of continental unity; it’s also a testament to the ongoing mass-cultural potential of traditional media, and linear public service broadcasting in particular. (It boasts a higher TV audience than the Super Bowl, for example.) It is also reliably political, despite claiming to be a respite from politics. Often, the politics are petty; growing up in the UK, I’d routinely hear grumbling about (quite literal) bloc voting on the part of, say, neighboring countries in Eastern Europe, a complaint that reflected some mix of reality, casual xenophobia, and a refusal to acknowledge that British entries—the nightmarish airline-inspired bubblegum-pop number “Flying the Flag,” for instance—might have struggled on merit. (Eurovision winners are determined by combining the verdict of juries of experts with a continent-wide popular vote, in which viewers can opt for any entry bar their country’s own. In fact, the vote is more than continent-wide: Eurovision involves a handful of countries from beyond Europe’s borders, including Israel and Australia.) Sometimes, however, the politics have been much more fraught. Following mass protests (and an attendant clampdown on press freedom) in Belarus, the country tried to enter a song about teaching people to “toe the line,” and was eventually expelled. In 2016, Russia was favored to win, but lost out to Ukraine, whose entrant sang of the persecution of the Tatars of Crimea; Ukraine apparently convinced the organizers that its song was historical, not political, but it had clear contemporary resonance given Russia’s recent occupation of Crimea, and Russian state media declared something like an international incident. On February 24, 2022, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That same day, Eurovision’s organizers indicated that, since the event is nonpolitical, Russia would still be able to compete—but a day later, they reversed course and banned it from participating. A Eurovision official later told a BBC program (which was being guest-directed by a member of ABBA) that the contest always stands up for “the basic and ultimate values of democracy.”

For decades, Russia, then part of the Soviet Union, and other countries behind the Iron Curtain didn’t take part in Eurovision. In the mid-sixties, Czechoslovakia hosted Intervision, a contest that has since often been described as a communistic rival to Eurovision, but was actually, according to the historian Dean Vuletic, an intended bridge between East and West. Intervision would recur on and off, but then the Berlin Wall came down, and it was consigned to history. Until, that is, this past weekend, when the regime of Russian president Vladimir Putin revived it, presenting the contest (inaccurately, per Vuletic) as a proud part of the country’s heritage. There would be entrants, we learned, from countries including India, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, and Qatar. Also, for some reason, the United States (though this didn’t necessarily reflect the official sanctioning of a delegation; indeed, the representational criteria were unclear). The US entrant was initially supposed to be B. Howard, a singer who has been rumored, without evidence, to be the offspring of Michael Jackson—though in the days before the event, he dropped out, citing family reasons, and was replaced by Vassy, a dance-music artist who was born in Australia to Greek parents, but is a US citizen. (As a quick aside, Eurovision artists do not have to be citizens of the country they represent: Dion, of course, is Canadian; the 2021 entrant from the tiny nation of San Marino was supported onstage by Flo Rida.)

On Saturday, Intervision went live. The graphics incorporated an old-timey Cold War–era title card—but that soon gave way to shooting pink lines of light and shots of a crowd of people brandishing glowing bracelets and waving flags. The BBC’s excellent Russia correspondent Steve Rosenberg reported ahead of time that, given the country’s crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights, there would be “no sign of camp” on display. The clips that I’ve seen were not not camp; indeed, the overall aesthetic appeared to be that of an even lower-rent Eurovision clone. But the event’s politics were telegraphed clearly in rhetorical ways. Ahead of time, Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, reportedly said that Intervision would be free of “perversions” and the “mockery of human nature”; shortly after it got underway, Putin himself appeared on-screen to attest to the event’s “traditional values.” In the end, Vassy did not appear—the show’s hosts announced that she had had to withdraw following what they described as “unprecedented political pressure” from Australia. (It’s still not totally clear what actually happened.) Perhaps fittingly, the winner—Vietnam’s Duc Phuc, with “Heavenly Prince of Phù Đổng”—was determined by a jury, without any attendant public vote. When a country wins Eurovision, it hosts it the following year. (With some exceptions: after Ukraine won in 2022, for instance, the UK hosted in 2023 due to the ongoing war.) At the end of Intervision, it was announced that the next edition will be held in Saudi Arabia.

Ahead of this year’s Intervision, the government of Ukraine slammed the event as a cynical exercise in “propaganda” and “whitewashing,” aimed at distracting attention from Russian war crimes. This raises the question of whether it actually worked on such terms. Russian officials grandiosely proclaimed that the broadcast would be available to some four billion people—the combined population of the countries that took part—and hyped the event domestically, via both state media and physical installations. But Russian journalists reported ahead of time that the organizers had to resort to paying people to look interested. Global interest, as measured by social media engagement, also appeared to be anemic in the buildup to the event, and by the time the winner was announced, only nine thousand or so people were watching live on the official YouTube stream, according to the New York Times. (As of this morning, the stream had racked up some hundred and thirty thousand views—hardly Eurovision numbers.) The independent Moscow Times reported, meanwhile, that the broadcast was punctuated by technical glitches as well as staging and pronunciation gaffes. The outlet’s headline declared that Intervision had “hit a flat note.” 

There are reasons to be cautious about such conclusions, however. In this fragmented, multiplatform media age, there are various ways to measure reach. (Duc Phuc, for instance, has more than two million followers on Instagram.) And the aim may not have been extending reach so much as sending the message—both internationally, but also to a domestic audience—that, as the BBC’s Rosenberg put it in a colorful dispatch from inside the arena, “there are still plenty of nations willing to share an international stage with Russia.” (Russia’s own entrant, a pro-war artist known by the stage name “Shaman,” said after performing that his country had “won already” because “we have all of you here as our guests,” a statement intended as a welcoming gesture—Shaman told the jury to discount his performance, since it wouldn’t be right for the hosts to win under “the laws of hospitality”—that nonetheless had a telling double meaning.) The Guardian noted ahead of the event that Intervision looked like “an attempt to build alternative cultural infrastructure outside western-dominated spaces,” likening it, in this sense, to the “reorientation” of Russian state media networks that were largely banned in Europe following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. At the time, amid some self-congratulation among Western observers that Russian war propaganda was failing to bite beyond its borders, I warned that this reflected a limited reading of the aims of that propaganda—which, again, was also domestically oriented—as well as its appeal in non-Western contexts that tend to pass under the radar of major news outlets.

Fast-forward three and a half years, and Intervision is just one data point suggesting that Russia hardly seems to be suffering from crippling international isolation or disavowal as it tightens the screws on Ukraine: as I wrote recently, President Trump just handed Putin the optical gift of a summit in Alaska; in the past couple of weeks, Russia has been probing the boundaries of NATO’s defenses in ways that have garnered significant news coverage, but would surely have been seen as a vastly bigger deal in the early days of the war. And Europe, in many ways, appears increasingly disunited. This dynamic can be seen at the level of media infrastructure, including in the realm of public broadcasting, which, as I wrote last year, is under growing financial and political pressure across the continent. Relatedly, it can be seen in the realm of Eurovision. The next installment, which is slated to be held in Austria, is months away, but has already been engulfed by a row over the participation of Israel, with numerous nations citing that country’s conduct in Gaza (including its killing of journalists) as grounds to boycott the competition should Israel be present; last week, the board of Spain’s member broadcaster voted to withdraw under such conditions—a big deal since the country is one of a handful that automatically qualify for Eurovision each year thanks to their outsize financial contributions to the broadcasting union that hosts the event. (As The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane once advised, “Think of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, add a blast of dry ice, and you get the idea.”) Paul Jordan, a Eurovision expert, told Politico that while the event is no stranger to politics, the tensions over Israel represent “probably the most serious challenge that Eurovision has had.”

For now, we’ll have to wait and see what happens on this front. But already, we’re a long way from the gauzy days after the fall of the USSR, when the union behind Eurovision expanded to include broadcasters from the former Eastern Bloc that seemed eager, as The Guardian put it recently, to “assert their European identity,” a dynamic that coincided with “Eurovision’s growing association with LGBTQ+ causes.” Rosenberg recalled recently that in 1996, he was taking a guided tour of Russian TV when he got chatting to a producer about his love of Eurovision and wound up being asked to cohost the selection of Russia’s entrant, in a studio lit up by excitement “not only about Eurovision, but about Russia being part of the European family.” On the red carpet ahead of Intervision over the weekend, Rosenberg asked Dima Bilan—who, in 2008, became the only Russian to win Eurovision—whether he was sad that his country is no longer allowed to take part in it. “I miss it, yes, because this is my history,” Bilan said. “But we have new history now.”

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