Lily Lynch is a foreign affairs writer and the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Balkanist Magazine.
This week, Russian popstar Yaroslav Dronov will perform his new saccharine power ballad “Pryamo po serdtsu” (“Straight to the Heart”) onstage in Moscow. The song is a stadium pop anthem about heartbreak, exactly the kind of sentimental fluff that has earned the 33-year-old singer his core fanbase: teen girls and their mothers. But Dronov’s performance on Saturday is also part of a calculated effort to send a very different audience a very different message — one with stark geopolitical implications.
Known by his stage name “Shaman,” Dronov is a platinum blond pro-war nationalist who has used his music to help rally support for the Russian war effort. The EU sanctioned him last year for these performances, including concerts held in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine and a patriotic event coinciding with the anniversary of the full-scale invasion, where Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared onstage.
Now the Kremlin is giving its nationalist pop icon a much bigger, more global showing: Dronov will be competing this weekend in Intervision, a newly revived alternative to the long-running Eurovision Song Contest. Russia has been banned from Eurovision since the start of the invasion.
The Intervision Song Contest was held for several years between 1965 and 1980, and was led by countries from the Eastern Bloc. After many years spent dormant, it’s being brought back now in a new form by Putin’s decree. Russian officials say “friendly” nations from around the world will be participating; China, India, Serbia and Cuba are among the 20 competitors vying to win the international song contest.
Intervision’s revival is about more than pop and kitsch: It’s a soft power ploy by Putin, who has been using non-Western cultural events to strengthen Russia’s political alliances with countries in the Global South. As the Kremlin pushes back against Western efforts to isolate Russia, it is positioning itself as a custodian of an emergent multipolar order. Cultural initiatives like Intervision — which is meant to showcase “traditional” conservative values and help court Russian allies — could bring it closer to this goal.
Musical Geopolitics
Like this year’s Intervision, the Soviet-era original was born out of a world riven by geopolitical rivalry.
In 1956, an alliance of Western European broadcasters founded the Eurovision Song Contest. The competition had several aims, chief among them the easing of tensions in post-war Europe and the promotion of technological advancement in the then-avant-garde field of live broadcast television. It quickly became a platform for pop-culture diplomacy and the projection of participating nations’ influence.
But Cold War polarization meant that Eastern Bloc countries were excluded from competing and would remain so until the collapse of communism. If they wanted a song contest, they would have to create one of their own. So the International Radio and Television Organization, headquartered in Czechoslovakia, launched Intervision.
From the outset, Intervision’s organizers wanted to include participants from the West. (They had in fact proposed a joint event with Eurovision organizers, who rejected the idea.) In 1968, three years after Intervision launched, Slovak reformer Alexander Dubček assumed leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Dubček, who famously promised “socialism with a human face,” introduced liberalization policies that loosened restrictions on media and travel, paving the way for a more expansive Intervision.
“The 1968 Intervision became the first pan-European edition,” Dean Vuletic, a historian of both Eurovision and Intervision, said in an interview. “It was open to artists from East and West, which made it more internationally open than Eurovision.” That year, Intervision brought together participants from Bulgaria, East Germany, Poland and the Soviet Union, along with others including Austria, Belgium, Spain and West Germany.
But it wouldn’t last long. The Soviet Union saw liberalization in Czechoslovakia as a threat to the entire communist project, and months later, it rolled tanks into Prague, crushing Dubček’s nascent liberal experiment. The Intervision Song Contest fell dormant for years.
Only in 1977, when Polish television broadcasters opted to repurpose the Sopot International Song Festival as Intervision, did the competition return. The Polish organizers wanted Intervision to be even more international than the pan-European event organized nearly a decade earlier. They welcomed competitors from as far afield as Cuba, Nigeria and New Zealand. But this spectacle of gold-lamé internationalism was short-lived, crushed once again by the weight of history. In 1981, in response to a series of miners’ strikes and protests that had grown into the Solidarity movement, the Polish government declared martial law, making the organization of Intervision impossible.
“As the Kremlin pushes back against Western efforts to isolate Russia, it is positioning itself as a custodian of an emergent multipolar order.”
The song contest would collect dust on the shelf for decades, seemingly destined to remain a colorful footnote in late 20th-century history. Eurovision, meanwhile, grew in popularity and scope, expanding to include Russia and the countries of Eastern Europe after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But in 2008, Russia hosted a revived Intervision Song Contest in Sochi. It was held just weeks after Russia invaded Georgia, a critical departure point in U.S.-Russia relations.
Then, in 2014 — the year Russia annexed Crimea, triggering Western sanctions — Russian officials again announced that Intervision would return. Although it didn’t come to pass that year, a clear pattern was emerging: Russia’s efforts to resurrect Intervision always came at moments when divisions between Moscow and the West grew particularly acute.
Courting The Global South
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the West’s response was decisive: Russia was suspended from the Council of Europe, the UN Human Rights Council, FIFA, the Union of European Football Associations, the Olympics, the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency and Eurovision, among other Western-dominated institutions and organizations. The EU removed Russian banks from SWIFT, the Brussels-based global interbank messaging system. A coalition of nations also took measures to impede Russia from profiting from energy exports. And more than 1,000 companies announced they would reduce or abandon operations in Russia, including McDonald’s, Amazon, IKEA and Google.
Many Western commentators said then that Russia was about to become an isolated pariah state — the next North Korea, no longer at home among the family of nations. President Joe Biden declared that Putin was “more isolated from the world than he ever has been.”
It soon became clear that this assessment was rooted in a distorted, Western-centric view of the world. Successive votes before the United Nations General Assembly revealed that in the Global South, there was significant ambivalence about how best to respond to the conflict. Of the 193 members of the assembly, 141 voted to condemn Russia’s invasion, but there were stark geographic variations: Just 28 out of 54 African states supported the resolution. Many countries that did vote to condemn the invasion took a different rhetorical line than NATO states did, emphasizing the need for a diplomatic engagement and peace.
But the real litmus test of global sentiment, as far as Moscow was concerned, was the reluctance of many countries in the Global South to follow the West’s punitive actions: A mere 39 member states imposed sanctions intended to hinder Russia’s capacity to wage war in Ukraine.
In response, Russia turned to China and others in the Global South — nations it calls the “world majority.” In March 2022, it legalized parallel imports, or gray market goods, opening alternative supply chains to import restricted goods via countries that had refused to impose sanctions, including China, Türkiye, Brazil, India and Serbia. Russia also substituted lost Western goods with new brands from countries like Türkiye and China, and significantly increased trade with the latter: Between January and October of last year, China accounted for nearly 35% of Russia’s foreign trade, up from 17.9% in 2021.
As political scientist Vuk Vuksanovic has written, Russia’s increased foreign policy engagement with the Global South helps “compensate for the breakdown in its partnership with the West and prove to the West that attempts to isolate Russia are futile.” These efforts have extended beyond trade: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov went on a tour of Africa during the summer of 2022, and the following July, St. Petersburg hosted a Russia-Africa Summit. Russia also strengthened ties with the Middle East through the Russia-Gulf Cooperation Council Strategic Dialogue and with Southeast Asia through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Critical to this pivot by Russia is BRICS, the grouping of emerging economies created as the Global South’s geoeconomic and geostrategic counterweight to the West. In October 2024, Russia hosted the BRICS Summit, an annual event held in different countries on a rotating basis. Twenty heads of state traveled to Kazan to attend, including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Russia also hosted the BRICS Games in Kazan that summer, following its banishment from the Olympics.
“Russia has borrowed from the Soviet Union’s moral capital outside the West, where many countries in Africa and Asia remember Moscow as a champion of their decolonization.”
In courting the Global South, Russia has borrowed from the Soviet Union’s moral capital outside the West, where many countries in Africa and Asia remember Moscow as a champion of their decolonization. This legacy has aided Russia’s organization of Intervision and other soft power events since its commercial and cultural expulsion from Western-led institutions. After designer brands like Prada, Fendi and Chanel suspended or eliminated business in Russia in protest of the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moscow hosted the BRICS+ Fashion Summit, which Russian designer Alexandra Kaloshina told BRICS Magazine in 2023 would initiate a “decolonization of design.”
This year’s Intervision is part of Russia’s broader cultural diplomacy program designed to send the message that in the nascent multipolar world, it still has plenty of friends. Just as the internationalism of the Cold War-era Intervision Song Contest revealed the Eurocentrism of Eurovision, the 2025 iteration of Intervision will attempt to underscore a similar point: that Russia supports an enhanced role for the “world majority” against the parochialism of the West.
Promoting ‘Traditional’ Values
As Eurovision evolved over the decades, it became a stage for the promotion of social liberalism, so-called “European values” and progressive causes, including LGBTQ rights. The winner in 2003 was t.A.T.u, a pop duo from Russia posing as lesbians as a marketing gimmick. In 2014, Austrian performer Conchita Wurst, known as the “bearded drag queen,” won the contest. Wurst’s performance was a turning point, adding fuel to an ongoing conservative cultural shift in Russia, which had recently passed its anti-gay “propaganda” law. (In a decade, Russia had gone from the cynical co-option of LGBTQ identities with t.A.T.u to criminalizing them.)
Russia’s embrace of “traditional” values was shaped in opposition to the progressive turn in the U.S. As American domestic culture became more permissive, Russia adopted more conservative rhetoric and laws. In recent years, it has even positioned itself as an “anti-woke sanctuary,” issuing temporary residence permits to Americans “fleeing militant wokeism rampant in the West.”
Russian politicians have decried non-traditional sexual relations as both a Western import and deliberate tool of Western foreign policy, and view Eurovision as a conduit: “This is the end of Europe,” fulminated Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky after Wurst’s victory. “It’s rotted away. There are no more men and women. There is just ‘it.’” Valery Rashkin, the deputy leader of the Communist Party, echoed his sentiments: “We cannot tolerate this madness,” he said at the time, insisting that Russia leave Eurovision and organize a heterosexual alternative.
More than a decade later, Intervision 2025 is poised to fulfill that vision. Regulations for this year’s contest emphasize “traditional universal and family values.” Russian senator Lilia Gumerova told local press that Intervision would be a “chance to promote real music” and “not fake values that are alien to any normal person.” Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, stated that there would be “no perversions or mockery of human nature” at the contest. In a recent interview, he also stressed that Intervision would promote the “preservation of cultural sovereignty.”
Putin went further in his speech ahead of the song contest this week. “Our task in the modern world is to join forces to preserve the identity and diversity of cultures, traditions and worldviews,” he said, adding that they should “counteract the threats of extinction of small cultures.” This sends two messages: One, that unlike the West, Russia respects the traditional cultures of the countries of the Global South and does not wish to impose its own values on them. And two, that Russia respects the distinctive musical and artistic culture of those countries in the face of encroaching Western cultural hegemony.
This is reflected in some of the artistic selections for this year’s Intervision, which draw heavily on traditional regional styles. And unlike Eurovision, where many songs are performed in English, Intervision’s performers will sing in their native languages.
“While the Soviet-era Intervision was organized to transcend Cold War divisions, this year’s contest is part of an effort to throw them to stark relief.”
With Intervision, Russia is making a pitch to the Global South: Align with us and we won’t lecture you to embrace liberal values like LGBTQ rights. It’s also sending another, more global message: that diplomatic isolation undermines intercultural dialogue. Russia hopes to position itself as a rational actor that’s willing to engage openly with other states.
In his remarks about Intervision earlier this week, Putin attempted to link Western decadence to Western arrogance and isolation. “History proves that the brightest periods of cultural flourishing occur during their active interaction with the outside world,” he said. “Conversely, when a society closes in on itself and blindly, dogmatically believes in its … superiority over others, a period of spiritual and intellectual crisis sets in, followed by cultural decline and stagnation, and in all spheres of life.”
Just as social liberalism now appears to be part of Eurovision’s DNA, Russia is hoping that through events like Intervision, it can foster respect for “traditional” values and cultural sovereignty in the emergent multipolar world.
Striking A New Tone
Other than the name, there is little that connects the Soviet-era Intervision and the 2025 event. While the original was organized to transcend Cold War divisions, this year’s contest is part of an effort to throw them to stark relief. Russia, rejected and isolated by the West, is hoping to consolidate a non-Western bloc, courting countries from the Global South to do so. Gone is the old Intervision ethic of bridgebuilding; this year’s iteration is a soft power ploy to drive existing wedges in the global order deeper, while proving to the West that its attempts to isolate Russia have been in vain.
Despite the official rhetoric, some experts aren’t convinced that Intervision will represent much of an ideological break with Eurovision. The unipolar world may be dying, but Western cultural soft power still reigns supreme. Russian literary critic and cultural historian Ilya Kukulin doubts that the new Intervision will be “traditional.” “It will most likely be an imitation of Eurovision,” he said in an interview, featuring “globalized English-language pop music with the addition of various kinds of national exoticism and world music.”
For now, Intervision won’t come close to matching the popularity of Eurovision, which helped launch the careers of superstars like ABBA and Celine Dion. This year, Eurovision amassed 166 million viewers worldwide. YouTube videos for Intervision songs, meanwhile, have just thousands of views each. But Intervision will be significant in another way: It will demonstrate that Russia can still draw artists from around the world, suggesting that the West’s political and diplomatic influence is on the decline.
In recent years, Western officials have applied substantial pressure on countries of the Global South in the hopes that they will join sanctions on Russia. But not a single one has done so. In an era increasingly defined by China’s rise and the specter of American retreat, the Global South seems to recognize that it no longer has to choose.
No matter what place Dronov scores for Russia in the song competition this weekend, Intervision will make a small contribution to the foundations of a new, multipolar world with Moscow among its leaders. Intervision may not compete with Eurovision yet, but its organization demonstrates that Russia is not alone on the world stage. That, for Putin, is surely a victory.
