By Kyrill Kunakhovich
In September 2025, the Eurovision Song Contest came to Moscow—or so it seemed. Performers from twenty-two countries took turns singing and strutting on stage, bedecked in colorful costumes and trailed by armies of backup dancers. Fans swayed and waved flags in the aisles. An international jury gave out points, building suspense until the dramatic reveal. But this was not Eurovision, which banned Russia in 2022 after its full-scale attack on Ukraine. It was instead a different contest, Intervision, featuring acts from countries such as India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, China, and the eventual winner, Vietnam. Echoing Eurovision’s slogan, “United by Music,” Intervision promised “Unity through Music.” Even its color scheme was the same as Eurovision’s blue-red-purple palette, described in the official media guide as “a metaphor for dawn, the beginning of a new era in the history of the Intervision Contest.”[1]
Indeed, 2025 was not the first iteration of the Intervision Song Contest (ISC). It was originally launched in 1965 for members of the Warsaw Pact and took place eight times during the Cold War—four in Czechoslovakia (1965-1968) and four in Poland (1977-1980). Predictably, Western newspaper coverage of the latest ISC focused on its roots. “Back in the USSR,” Reuters declared; “Putin revives Soviet-era ‘Eurovision’ with new allies.”[2] The Guardian called the contest “both nostalgic throwback and very modern geopolitical manoeuvre,” identifying it as “a crucial tool of cultural diplomacy.”[3] But what can the ISC’s Cold War past tell us about its future? And what does the contest’s now sixty-year history reveal about its model, Eurovision?
Like the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), the ISC took its name from an association of television broadcasters. The Intervision Network was set up in 1960 to exchange television programs among members of the Eastern Bloc. In search of new material, it reached out to Western Europe’s Eurovision network in 1964 proposing a pan-European music show.[4] By then the ESC was in its ninth year and had no interest in changing formats. Spurned by the West, the Intervision Network decided to create its own song contest, which launched the following year in its home base of Prague. Reform was in the air. Across the Bloc, communist governments set out to show responsiveness to social needs; they upped production of consumer goods, relaxed censorship, and invested in popular entertainment. The Intervision Song Contest was to be a showcase for this new and gentler form of rule: what Czechoslovak politicians would soon term “socialism with a human face.”
A major feature of the new approach was greater contact with the West. Travel outside the Bloc remained practically impossible and access to Western culture was tightly controlled. The ISC, however, was meant to ease the public’s sense of isolation, both by providing a glitzy spectacle on par with the West’s and by incorporating Western performers. Although participation in the first three contests was limited to Intervision members—Warsaw Pact states plus neutral Finland and Yugoslavia—Western European acts featured as guest stars. In both 1966 and 1967, the Eurovision winner subsequently performed at Intervision. By 1968, with the Prague Spring in full swing, the ISC welcomed its first Western contestants—from Austria, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland, and West Germany. Whereas Eurovision refused to accept Eastern Bloc singers, Intervision was showing off its openness, for the benefit of foreign and domestic audiences alike.
That openness came to a sudden end in August 1968. Just months after that year’s ISC, four of the countries that had sent contestants sent armed forces to snuff out the Prague Spring. Calls for reform had escalated beyond what Soviet authorities were willing to tolerate. No longer satisfied with seeing Western singers on TV, Czechs and Slovaks demanded freedom to travel abroad, friendly relations with the West, and multiparty democracy.[5] A sliver of openness had only whetted an appetite for more, and communist hardliners took notice. After the invasion, Czechoslovakia’s new regime framed Western influences as a threat and shut down the ISC. The contest had become too popular for its own good, blurring the line between East and West in a way Moscow could not stomach.
The contest returned nine years later, under another Eastern Bloc regime looking for popular support. In June 1976, price hikes in Poland led to protests that the regime violently crushed. A few months afterwards, Polish officials decided to revive the ISC as part of the long-running Sopot Music Festival on Poland’s Baltic coast. The contest was a natural fit with Polish Television’s so-called “propaganda of success,” which aimed to distract viewers from the country’s economic ills by showcasing its achievements. On Sopot’s stage, communist rulers could present Poland as they wanted it to be: prosperous, colorful, and open to the world. All four Polish editions of the ISC featured Western contestants—from Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and as far afield as Canada. Guest stars such as Gloria Gaynor, the Temptations, and Petula Clark also performed. At a time when very few Poles could travel abroad, the ISC brought the world to them. It established Poland as a global destination fully on par with all the states Poles could not visit.
“It looked very much like Eurovision,” recalled Marion Rung, the Finnish winner of the 1980 ISC. She knew firsthand, having performed twice at the ESC. “They took very good care of us. We lived in a luxurious hotel,” Rung continued; “it was wonderful, I felt like a queen everywhere.”[6] The propaganda of success was clearly working, though cracks were beginning to show. Amid Poland’s hard currency shortage, Rung was not allowed to take her prize money out of the country. Other winners received their prizes late, or not at all. At the same time, the mere announcement of the prizes—a new car, a yacht—rankled many Poles viewers watching at home. The 1980 ISC took place against the backdrop of more protests, brought on by shortages and a new round of price hikes. The epicenter of the protests was only a few miles from Sopot, in Gdańsk’s Lenin Shipyards, where striking workers issued the government a list of demands. These included telling the truth about the country’s economic crisis and focusing production on domestic needs instead of foreign exports.[7] The demands blasted the regime for putting on appearances—the very thing the ISC was meant to do.
Yet attitudes towards the song contest itself were less dismissive. “The local population was an inscrutable enigma,” remembered Polish journalist Janusz Atlas, who attended the 1980 ISC. “During the day, they demonstrated near the shipyard, and after dusk, they had a great time at the festival. Truly!”[8] The ISC was genuinely popular among Polish viewers. What they objected to was that this world of comfort, openness, and international mobility only existed on TV. Eight days after the 1980 ISC concluded, the Polish government gave in to workers’ demands, allowing them to form the first independent trade union in the Eastern Bloc: Solidarity. Over the next year and a half, Solidarity reconfigured Polish politics, pushing the government to address real social needs. This entailed cancelling the lavish ISC: Polish Television’s 1981 statement that “in the current economically and socially tense situation such expenditures would not be approved by the population” was surely self-serving, but not incorrect.[9] A few months later, though, Polish authorities decided that the freedoms Solidarity demanded went too far. To preempt another Soviet invasion—or so they claimed—they imposed martial law and reasserted control. When martial law came to an end in 1983, the Sopot Music Festival continued, but without the ISC. As in Czechoslovakia, the contest had grown too entwined with expectations of reform.
The Intervision Network became obsolete with the end of the Cold War and disbanded in 1993. Its name, though, briefly reappeared in 2008, when it was added to a preexisting Russian singing competition, “Five Stars.” Under the title “Five Stars. Intervision,” the contest opened up to eleven post-Soviet states, though most performers sang in Russian. By the time it took place, however, Russia’s attention had already shifted to a grander project: hosting Eurovision. After finishing second two years earlier, Russian singer Dima Bilan won the 2008 ESC, which meant that Russia would stage the following year’s contest. The 2009 edition took place in Moscow’s Olympic Stadium, built for the 1980 Summer Olympics, and was reportedly the most expensive ESC to date. In this environment, a separate music contest was unnecessary, so Intervision was abruptly dropped. Plans to revive it surfaced five years later, amid conservative outrage at the winner of the 2014 ESC—Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst—yet nothing came to pass. Instead, Russia returned to Eurovision and remained a fixture, achieving three more top-three finishes.
Everything changed in 2022, when Russian troops launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Eurovision promptly banned Russia from competing, saying the contest stood for “the basic and ultimate values of democracy.”[10] Only then—having been spurned again, as during the Cold War—did Kremlin leaders circle back to Intervision. Initially, the contest was conceived as a showcase for BRICS: a bloc of ten non-Western states (Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, South Africa, and the UAE) that views itself as an alternative to the Western G7. Eventually, “Intervision 2025” grew even larger, accepting entries from countries such as Serbia (which also took part in that year’s ESC) and the US.
Indeed, the claim to openness has been a core refrain in all the incarnations of the ISC. Since 1968, every edition has welcomed contestants from around the world—by contrast to the ESC, which restricts participation to members of the Eurovision Network.[11] That openness was a major talking point at Intervision 2025, whose organizers stressed that it was “a free stage, without any political restrictions or influences.”[12] Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov compared this attitude with the behavior of Western states, which “are building new walls [and] introducing a new visa regime so that no one can travel to the West.”[13] He was not wrong. Participation in the ESC, like access to the EU, comes with rules and conditions that much of the world is unable to meet. The only reason Intervision exists—the only reason it has ever existed—is that its organizers were excluded from Eurovision. In that sense, it is less a rival or alternative to the ESC than a substitute for it.
When Russia released the first plans for Intervision 2025, one point of contrast with the ESC stood out. The contest’s regulations stressed that contestants must respect “traditional, universal, and family values,” implicitly prohibiting any display of LGBTQ+ identity.[14] “Promoting homosexuality” is banned in Russia, and state officials have long criticized Eurovision for doing just that. Lavrov proclaimed that Intervision would be very different, and Western journalists anticipated a more solemn show. In the event, there were no pride flags but plenty of flamboyant outfits. The top prize—a crystal spiral, described in the media guide as “merging in a sensual dance with the unique atmosphere of Intervision”—went to Vietnamese singer Duc Phuc, whose best-known song has been called a “queer anthem.”[15] In all, the show looked and sounded much like Eurovision, as was the case with Cold War-era ISCs. Their goal was never to create a different music contest, or a different kind of music. It was instead to marry Eurovision’s music with a different politics—or, put another way, to divorce its music from the politics of European integration.
Western observers quickly recognized that Intervision 2025 was above all a political project. Shortly after the contest was announced, Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called it “an instrument of hostile propaganda and a means of whitewashing the aggressive policy of the Russian Federation.”[16] At a press conference introducing the event, Lavrov was asked several times whether he saw Intervision as a weapon of soft power and conceded that the contest gave Russia “the opportunity to let [the world] know about itself.” He added, though, that it was equally an opportunity to let Russians know about the world. At a time when “almost all of Europe [was] ignoring [Russians] and turning away from communication,” the contest allowed them to experience “natural tendencies of human development,” such as international contact and cultural exchange.[17] This, too, had been a key goal of the Cold War-era ISCs, which brought the West to Eastern Europe in part so Eastern Europeans would feel less deprived of access to the West. In actuality, as we have seen, both Czechoslovak and Polish versions of the ISC only intensified this sense of deprivation, making it all too clear what Eastern Europeans lacked. Portraying internationalism on TV turned out to be no substitute for experiencing it in real life.
That brings us back to Eurovision—the contest that inspired the first ISC sixty years ago and still inspires it today. The key to its success is not catchy songs and glitzy costumes, both of which Intervision can provide. Rather, it is the fact that the community we see on stage is real; that the experience of crossing national borders, encountering other cultures, and mingling with different nationalities can also be shared by viewers at home. That is something Intervision has never been able to offer. Warsaw Pact states controlled their populations far too tightly for the display of openness on stage to become part of daily life, and states such as Russia do the same today. The TV spectacles they stage can only be unfulfilled promises of transnational mobility—promises that can easily backfire. Eurovision has nothing to fear from Intervision. What it should fear is the erosion of European unity, because it is this unity that makes the promises of Eurovision real.
Kyrill Kunakhovich is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Communism’s Public Sphere: Culture as Politics in Cold War Poland and East Germany (Cornell University Press, 2022). His current book project is entitled “The Old Town: Warsaw, UNESCO, and the Polish Origins of World Heritage.”
Notes
[1] See the Intervision Media Guide. https://intervision.world/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Media_Guide-EN.pdf
[2] Guy Faulconbridge, “Back in the USSR: Putin revives Soviet-era ‘Eurovision’ with new allies.” Reuters, February 4, 2025. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/back-ussr-putin-revives-soviet-era-eurovision-with-new-allies-2025-02-04/
[3] Elise Morton, “Intervision Song Contest: Why Russia is reviving its ‘cultural counterweight’ to Eurovision.” The Guardian online, September 5, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/sep/05/intervision-song-contest-why-russia-is-reviving-its-cultural-counterweight-to-eurovision
[4] Dean Vuletic, Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest (Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 99-100.
[5] See, for instance, the Action Program of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, adopted in April 1968. https://www.marxists.org/subject/czech/1968/action-programme.htm
[6] David Mac Dougall, “Eurovision versus Intervision: Meet the last winner of the Cold War song contest.” EuroNews, May 5, 2022. https://www.euronews.com/culture/2022/05/12/eurovision-versus-intervision-the-last-winner-of-the-cold-war-song-contest
[7] See the 21 Demands of the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee, issued August 17, 1980. https://pl.wikisource.org/wiki/21_postulat%C3%B3w_Mi%C4%99dzyzak%C5%82adowego_Komitetu_Strajkowego_z_17_sierpnia_1980
[8] Quoted in Lidia Kopania-Przebindowska, “Zimna wojna w popkulturze: czołówki Festiwali Piosenki Interwizji i propaganda sukcesu.” Kultura popularna 2018/3 (57), pp. 46-59.
[9] Quoted in Vuletic, Postwar Europe, p. 107.
[10] Jamie Grierson, “Eurovision chief says Russia ban stands for ‘ultimate values of democracy.’” The Guardian online, December 30, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/dec/30/eurovision-chief-russia-ban-stands-for-ultimate-values-democracy
[11] Australia is the one exception: it was invited to compete in 2015, as part of a special anniversary event, but has appeared in all subsequent editions of the ESC.
[12] Igor Gavrilov, “Videnie nevidimo.” Komersant, November 20, 2023, p. 11. https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6349470
[13] “Vystuplenie i otvety na voprosy SMI Ministra Inostrannykh Del RF S.V. Lavrova.” Internet-Portal SNG, September 17, 2025. https://e-cis.info/news/566/130486/
[14] See the Intervision Contest Regulations. https://intervision.world/ wp-content/uploads/2025/06/14_04_Regulations_Intervision.pdf
[15] Alastair James, “Vietnamese singer wins Russia’s Eurovision rival Intervision.” PinkNews, September 23, 2025. https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/09/23/vietnamese-singer-wins-russias-eurovision-intervision/
[16] “MFA: Intervision-2025 song contest organized by Russia is propaganda tool, means of whitewashing aggressive policies.” Interfax-Ukraine, May 26, 2025. https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/1074903.html
[17] “Vystuplenie i otvety.”
