Abstract: This article goes behind the scenes of the first Miss USSR pageant in May 1989 to showcase the USSR’s shift toward legal entrepreneurial capitalism. The beauty contest was made possible by perestroika reforms that expanded opportunities for cooperatives, joint-stock companies, individual ownership, foreign travel, and international trade. Both the businessmen who organized Miss USSR-89 and the women who starred in it approached the pageant in an entrepreneurial way as an avenue for financial growth, international connection, and travel abroad. The contestants leveraged their bodily and sexual capital in search of a new life far away from the shrinking labor market and acute shortages of the late Soviet Union. Producers of their own commodification, the contestants stood on stage at the nexus of empowerment, entrepreneurship, and exploitation. The story of the USSR’s collapse and transition to capitalism is typically told as a drama starring men, but women’s experiences are equally critical to unlocking the turmoil and transformation wrought by perestroika. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, women constituted nearly 80 percent of the country’s unemployed, and both Gorbachev’s supporters and opponents blamed women for many of society’s ills—from declining birthrates to rising alcoholism. Female sexuality was also thrust to the forefront of debates about cultural liberalization and westernization. Beauty pageants were a glitzy, glamorous emblem of this upheaval. This article seeks to broaden our understanding of late Soviet entrepreneurship by shining a spotlight on women and the business of beauty.
Alexis Peri (Sun,) studied this question.