Singers from 23 countries, brightness and a global retransmission: Russia revives the intervivators, a musical competition created in the Soviet era and presented by Moscow as a rival of the Eurovision that promotes the “decadent” western values.
In the Live.arena stage, near Moscow, it will occur from this Saturday at 6.30 pm (French time), the artists of the country of the exsr (Bélarus, Ouzbékistan, Kazakhstan), Brics Partners (Brazil, India, South Africa, Egypt, United Arab Emirates …), but also Vassy (Vasiliki Karagiorgos) Music that will represent the United States.
To promote tonight, Russian public television even offered the transmission of a giant screen video … in Times Square, in the heart of New York. An Desaite at a time when Donald Trump says that his patience with Vladimir Putin “runs out quickly” due to the lack of progress to end the conflict in Ukraine, where Russia launched an offensive in 2022, so it was excluded from the Eurovision it won in 2008.
Designed as a song festival in the allied countries of the USSR, the first interview was organized in 1965 in Czechoslovakia. After the Prague Printemps repressed by the Soviet tanks in 1968, he was suspended before being relaunched in 1977 in Poland and then ceasing to exist with the fall of the USSR in the early 1990s.
A “typical competition of the Cold War”
Today, the new formula is more than ever a matter of geopolitics and cultural “power”. The organizers promise a “real music festival” but also of “national identity”, thus assuming the official Russian discourse that punishes the “decadent” west.
No country in the European Union will also send participants in the intervivor. “Relaunching the interview is counteracting the entertainment of the West and occupying the thread of a typical competition of the cold war”, Judge Cyrille Bret, a French geopolitista, who will soon publish with the researcher Florentier Parmentier to “Geopolitics of Eurovision”.
The head of Russian diplomacy Sergei Lavrov said nothing more when presenting the interview this week to journalists. Ironizing the victory in Eurovision in 2014 of the Austrian Barbue of Drag-Reina Conchita Wurst, said he did not challenge “the right of Eurovision spectators to vote for a man with a beard, dressed in a woman’s dress.”
“And if Eurovision is happy for someone, we do not prohibit anyone to look at them in our country,” he slipped.
Vladimir Putin erected Russia as a standard bearer of “traditional values”, faced with what he considers to be the moral “decay” of the West due to his tolerance towards LGBT+people.
A sign of the repression of sexual minorities in Russia, the country’s Supreme Court had banned “extremism” at the end of 2023 the “LGBT International Movement”, a blurred formulation that opened the door to heavy prison terms.
A “forum” for Russia
On Saturday night, near Moscow, each artist, such as the singer Qatari Dana al Meer, or the Denise Malgache, will sing in her mother tongue “, unlike Eurovision, where most songs are often interpreted in English,” they underline the organizers.
The Russian shaman, an emblematic figure of patriotic concerts organized by the Government, will present a lyrical song entitled “Right to Heart”. The program will be broadcast live or delayed in each participating country, according to its time zone, said Konstantin Ernst, managing director of the Public Television Percy of Russia Kanal, main organizer of the Intervivor.
For Cyrille Bret, Russia has sought, since its exile of Eurovision, “Stands and Radiation Canals”.
“The raising of the intervivor, very popular in its time, participates in the reorientation of the Russian influence of the West to the East, Eurasia and South Global,” he explains.
The participating countries represent “4,334 billion people, more than half of the inhabitants of the planet”, welcomed a press conference Sergei Kirienko, senior official of the Russian presidential administration, chaired by the Competition Support Board.
The winning winner will be appointed by an international jury, unlike Eurovision, where the voices of the jury accumulate with those of the spectators who vote for text.
Source: BFM TV
