Spy work

Who was ‘Miss KGB’ who won a secret beauty contest in 1990?

One October morning in 1990, a photo of a woman appeared on the front page of the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. The woman on the cover — Katya Mayorova, as she was presented in the article — looked young, attractive, but also dangerous… posing with a gun.

“Miss KGB” — the headline read. But who was Katya Mayorova, the world’s only holder of an unusual title of a “security services beauty?”

The new face of the KGB

Despite the newly adopted policy of glasnost — Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to make the Soviet government more transparent — the KGB remained one of the most secretive state institutions of the USSR. The all-powerful agency had an image of a serious, widely feared security apparatus that was alien to any sort of frivolity.