Władysław Szpilman, the eternal pianist in Roman Polanski's film, lived long enough to create a contest, the Sopot Festival, which brought fresh air to a Poland that was crying out for it. In the late 1970s, the event was renamed Intervision and became a Soviet showcase for Eurovision. It had a military logo and lasted for four editions (from 1977 to 1980) but, far from being a closed shop, it drew the crack in the Wall that was going to be evident after the ongoing invasion of Afghanistan and the protests in the Gdansk shipyards.
Many years after his disappearance and before the victory of the bearded Conchita Wurst in the 2014 Eurovision, Vladimir Putin considered recovering that pan-Soviet festival and abandoning the one that enthroned transvestites, transsexuals (Dana International, Israel, 1998) or heretical monsters ( Finns Lordi with Hard Rock Halleluja in 2006). It's strange, he didn't make it. His intention was to move away from the "decadence" of Europe and approach Asia to create a new festival. The night before last, in Turin, the non-sectarian spirit of Intervision resonated strongly with Ukraine's pan-European victory. In the Kremlin, in the absence of confirmation, only the sounds of silence were heard.
The last winner of Intervisión (with the exception of a single edition from 2008) was Marion Rung, who had also participated in the EBU festival, and whose country, Finland, has just knocked on the doors of NATO. The penultimate winner, Alla Pugacheva, still active, has received all the decorations of the Russian nomenklatura: Yeltsin, Medvedev, Putin...
The first country to win Intervisión was one that no longer exists. The honor went to Czechoslovakian Helena Vondráčková. "I have very good memories of that contest, which took place in the woods of the Opera Leszna and the audience was very enthusiastic," the legendary singer recalled to this newspaper on Thursday. Was Intervision a Soviet response to the West? "Politics had nothing to do with it, there were countries from all over the world and from other continents," she points out.
In the late 1970s, and unlike the military tensions of the cold war, very evident in the world of sports supremacy and Olympic boycotts, "music escaped better in that environment," explains Vondráčková, who had contracts with record companies. from West Germany. In reality, the idea of the Intervision festival was too diversionary for the Soviet leaders to the point that they canceled the 1981 edition as a protest against the emergence of the Solidarnosc union led by Lech Wałęsa and which was seen as counterrevolutionary by various countries under its wing. of the Kremlin. Facing each other on the Eurovision stages, Ukraine rules 3-1.
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