Authors

Discussion

Since 2022, Russia’s soft power has reconfigured its vectors and audiences. In part, this approach has been informed by Russia’s exclusions in Western-led mediatic mega-events, such as FIFA competitions and Eurovision. Unable to articulate its position in arenas where it could enter in direct discursive competition with the West, Russia has tried to create its own alternative and involve countries from the Global South and/or with an anti-Western inclination. Intervision, a Soviet-era musical contest, was revived in 2025 for this reason. Our paper puts forward the following arguments. First, Russia’s Intervision response was in fact informed by an ‘anxiety of influence’ for Eurovision, not so much as format but as the popularity and prestige that Eurovision has acquired over the years. Despite the self-aggrandising claim that Intervision 2025 would be the ‘number one show in the world,’ the context failed to resonate with many audiences across the countries involved, including Russia. Secondly, notwithstanding the event’s emphasis that music and culture are outside politics – which in the Russian official understanding coincides with Western liberalism – politics was reaffirmed at every step of the competition. Putin’s opening speech and Lavrov’s in-presence intervention were complemented by the contest’s accent on ‘traditional values’ and ‘friendship of the peoples’ on the one hand, and with tech prowess, bombastic holograms and larger-than-life screen projections on the other (in this sense, Intervision was ‘camp’). Third, the spectacle that resulted from the interaction of political, cultural, civilizational and technological anxieties to impress was an example of what we term “authoritarian cringe”. This new aesthetic approach, while aspiring to be like totalitarian kitsch (e.g. the sanitisation of what the dominant ideology considers to be ‘dirty’, ‘un-traditional’, ‘corruptive’), is not fully totalitarian, not fully kitsch: rather, it is expensive and grandiose in its planning as well as chaotic and cheap-looking in its realisation. Hence, our close reading of Intervision 2025 uncovers the discrepancies between how Russia wishes to position and advertise itself in the post-2022 world, and how this plays out in practice.