An 18-year-old model from St. Petersburg has won this year's Miss Russia title by humming a song from composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.Sophia Rudyeva was chosen from 50 contestants by a jury in Moscow's Manezh Central Exhibition Hall on Sunday.
The winner seemingly impressed the jury not just by her long, dark hair and her near-perfect vital statistics of 88-60-89 but also by her ability to improvise music.
In a so-called intellectual contest, pop singer and juror Dmitry Malikov asked if she could name her favorite composer and render some of his music. Rudyeva promptly mentioned Rimsky-Korsakov and hummed "The Flight of the Bumblebee," an interlude from the composer's "The Tale of Tsar Sultan" opera, written in 1899-1900, RIA-Novosti reported.
Rudyeva made headlines already last week when she beat her native peers, Miss St. Petersburg and Miss Leningrad Region, at a casting for the show in Moscow.
Her entry was helped by a change of the contest's regulations, which formerly stipulated that only winners of regional contests could participate, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported.
This year, anybody could sign up for a casting by filling out an application form on the web site Miss-Russia.ru.
Rudyeva took a prize of $100,000, which she said she would largely give to charity, and a chance to represent Russia at the next Miss Universe and Miss World contests.
The winner of the last Miss Russia contest, in December 2007, Ksenia Sukhinova, won the Miss World contest held in December 2008 in South Africa.
Sukhinova and the current Miss Universe, Dayana Mendoza from Venezuela, both appeared at Sunday's contest, RIA-Novosti reported.
Miss Russia was not the country's only beauty pageant to coincide with International Women's Day, which was celebrated Sunday.
Rosatom, the country's atomic industry conglomerate, announced on its web site Friday that Yekaterina Bulgakova, a 25-year-old legal adviser at a nuclear research facility in the Ulyanov region, had won the annual Miss Atom contest for the most beautiful nuclear industry worker.
A women's prison in Selo Gornoye, a town about 160 kilometers from Vladivostok, held a Lady Spring 2009 beauty contest on Thursday.
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