Although beauty contests did not find favour in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s, by 1991, before the collapse of the country, the Soviet beauty queen had become a symbol of perestroika itself. These photographs were taken between 1988 and 1990 in Leningrad at various beauty contests and at the Leningrad Beauty Institute, an academy preparing aspiring beauty queens for competition, and were acquired in St Petersburg by The Archive of Modern Conflict. The black-and-white pages show contestants in swimsuits exercising together in a studio, and the colour portraits include a young woman with blond curls in front of a poster in Cyrillic lettering and another exercising on a stationary bicycle.