The Soviet Union worshipped the Olympic games as a proof positive of Socialism’s inevitable victory, one mustachioed female shotputter at a time.
Those days may be history but their absurdist spirit lives on in the most appropriate of venues: the Eurovision Song Contest.
Just as Russia used to go to great lengths to demonstrate its worldwide superiority in speed-walking, it now throws its national prestige, along with $35 million (the most money in the event’s history), behind winning a talent competition that the rest of the world treats with tongue firmly in cheek.
Could you imagine Barack Obama touring the sets of the Miss America beauty pageant, or Gordon Brown coordinating the next installment of Big Brother?
Well, Prime minister Putin personally supervised the preparations for Eurovision; his handpicked director of state television demonstrating the unique and unprecedented capabilities of the stage sets like a collective farm chairman who had just overfulfilled his 5 year plan.
Last week, Kommersant, a leading serious liberal newspaper, reported with a straight face that “at the moment, it’s impossible to stage any serious shows in Europe because 80% of the continent’s lighting and sound effect machines have been brought to Moscow” for the extravaganza.
The opening ceremony was unveiled by Moscow’s mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who resembled an illegitimate child of Nikita Khruschev and Benito Mussolini as he pumped his fists in the air, blissfully oblivious to the joke of having a mayor who believes that homosexuality is ‘satanic’ unwittingly presiding over, in the words of the eventual winner, ‘the biggest gay parade’ in the world.
That’s not to say, of course, that Russia’s traditional nemeses are innocent of using Eurovision as a cultural war: after all, today’s Time magazine’s headline beams: ‘How the West Won: Norway Takes the Crown at Eurovision’.
And also not to discount the fact that the show was indeed a technological feat (eg: ‘Ukraine’s Svetlana Loboda, singing “Be My Valentine,” did splits on a ladder set inside an oversized wheel -which she paid for by mortgaging her house’).
Yet the salient impression from Eurovision 2009 was embarassment: embarassment for a confused, insecure Russia trying so hard to impress at something that the cool kids (like England, ranked last in 2008) all see as a bit of a joke.
Not unlike Olympic speedwalking, in fact.
