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MOSCOW, May 30: Russians revelled on Thursday in the news that a sharpshooting St Petersburg cop was crowned Miss Universe, saying it was about time the world took notice of the fabulous women who grew up behind the Iron Curtain.
Oxana Fedorova, a 24-year-old senior police lieutenant who grew up in the provincial town of Pskov won the diamond-studded tiara on Wednesday at the pageant in Puerto Rico, out-dazzling a field of 74 other hopefuls.
“It means they have officially recognised what is absolutely obvious and we already knew: that Russia has beautiful women,” said Lena Myasnikova, editor of the Russian edition of racy style bible Cosmopolitan.
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was “not surprised”.
“Russians can win in all kinds of competitions, starting with mathematics and Olympics, with young boys and girls, and all the way to beauty contests,” the Nobel peace prize laureate said during a stop in London for a conference.
Fedorova is no mere beauty, but a pistol-packing graduate student at St Petersburg’s Interior Ministry Academy, with the sort of background that would make James Bond sweat.
HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT, DOCTORAL THESIS: She was probably the only contestant with a police badge in hand-to-hand combat, and the only one defending a doctoral thesis on “civil law and the regulation of the activities of private security forces in the Russian Federation”.
Russian television alternated footage of her erupting in radiant glory as she was crowned in a silver gown in San Juan, with shots of her looking chillingly elegant in standard-issue olive drab police uniform: black necktie, white shirt, mid-thigh skirt, dark tights and knee-high black leather boots.
In one shot, the camera pans from her squinting eye, down the length of her uniformed arm to a manicured hand that squeezes off a 9 mm pistol round. Bang!
Next, she is shown doing aerobics in a white spandex bikini.
“That a Russian woman is not just beautiful, but also smart and energetic, this is typical,” said Myasnikova.
“Seventy years of socialism made Russian women fighters. They had to fight for everything: to get a nice blouse, to look pretty without any makeup, to try and make your apartment cosy when everything is leaking and falling apart, to feed your family when there was nothing for sale in the shops.”
Fedorova has won a six figure cash prize, use of a New York apartment and a contract for speaking engagements.
But at the St Petersburg academy, officials expected her to continue her law enforcement career, in a country where police can make less than 100 dollars a month.—Reuters
