A pillar of Western society, especially America, beauty pageants were outlawed in the Soviet Union since 1959 — no cheeky fashion, no celebration of beauty and elegance, no barely clothed girls.
But in 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev, the youngest General Secretary of the Communist Party, arrived and transformed the scene.
His accession brought in a new era of social freedom for USSR residents, including the ban on beauty pageants being lifted.
Held in the Luzhniki Palace of Sports in Soviet Moscow three years later, the first official USSR beauty pageant “Moscow Beauty 1988” became a major worldwide event.
The event was sponsored by the upscale German fashion magazine Burda Moden, whose editor and owner Mrs. Burda was a jury member with honor.
Advocates of the event permitted girls with any body participate in the contest and rejected all the rules. Among film producers, fashion photographers, international investors, fashion designers, and so on, attractive Russian girls gained instant admirers.
Participating in a beauty contest at that time meant mostly against the still-pre valuating public opinion that only ugly and disgraceful girls took part; girls whose moral values were well below public standards; girls who were more linked with prostitutes than beauty queens.
A schoolgirl Masha Kalinina ultimately prevailed in the tournament. The winner would be named “Miss USSR” only in the second iteration a year later.
Until the Soviet Union fell apart and vanished into the annals of history, this title stayed in force for an additional three years.
(Photo credit: Russia Archives).
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