The Russian Culture Ministry announced in November the plan to bring back the Intervision Song Contest. The socialist alternative to Eurovision was organized by countries behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.
The idea of Intervisión was born in Czechoslovakia in the early sixties, explains Dean Vuletic from Luxembourg. Russia, a country that debuted in Eurovision in 1994 and was suspended in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine, does not want to be left aside. The Russian Minister of Culture has announced his plan to return the contest that, occasionally, puts countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain (and some of it) to compete with music. The regulations of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) call the contest a “non-political event. But, politics has crept onto the scene in a sneaky and inevitable way since the beginning of Eurovision. And the enormous controversy this year over Israel's participation in the midst of its attacks on Palestine shows that for millions of followers, it is not easy to separate songs from life. Wadysaw Szpilman founded the Sopot International Song Festival in 1961. That contest was replaced in 1977 by the second version of the Intervisión Song Festival. Spain was the only nation in the liberal and (more or less) democratic West to participate in all four editions of the contest in its Polish version. The Catalan group Rumba Tres, formed by brothers Juan and Pedro Capdevila along with José Sardaa, competed in Sopot for Spain in 1978. The group won an award from the Polish press, radio, and television for their interpretation of the song. The polarization of the Cold War did not pose problems for the Catalan group, says Pedro Capdevila, despite the fact that the public showed enthusiasm for Catalan rumba in Poland. The story of how he survived World War II was brought to film by Roman Polanski in The Pianist, where the Pole is played by Adrien Brody. In the film, Brody plays the role of a Polish musician.