Conceived in 1960s Czechoslovakia, Vladimir Putin ordered the competition’s return and the US has now confirmed its participation – is this domestic theatre or international outreach?
Article by Elise Morton.
Featuring The Eurovisionphiles’s Dr Bárbara Barreiro León.
To understand why Russian president Vladimir Putin is now so engaged with the concept that he brought the contest back to life via a presidential decree in February requires examining how Eurovision itself has changed since the cold war. The European Broadcasting Union’s expansion eastward in the 1990s dramatically altered the contest’s character, bringing in broadcasters from former Soviet republics and communist states who used the platform to assert their European identity.
This shift coincided with Eurovision’s growing association with LGBTQ+ causes, beginning with Iceland’s Páll Óskar – the contest’s first openly gay contestant – in 1997 and followed by Dana International’s 1998 victory and Conchita Wurst’s triumph in 2014. The bearded drag queen’s win particularly rankled Moscow, coming just as Putin’s government was promoting “traditional values” and passing laws restricting LGBTQ+ content. For visual culture and identities scholar Bárbara Barreiro León, Intervision serves as a “cultural counterweight” to Eurovision, and is born of “a desire to challenge western cultural dominance, particularly as Eurovision has come to represent liberal, western values.”
Read the full article here: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/sep/05/intervision-song-contest-why-russia-is-reviving-its-cultural-counterweight-to-eurovision
