We arrived in a beautiful and exotic locale full of intrigue. Little did we know that St. Petersburg was totally in character for the tumultuous pageant itself, a reality TV production that participants and viewers found, strangely, all too familiar.

REALITY, TAKE TWO: Mrs. Russia finally receives the crown and the well wishes of her fellow delegates following the mistaken crowning of the 1st Runner-up that preceded. Following the true crowning, Mrs. World Sofia Arzhakovskaya and her husband, Sergei Veremeenko, happily acknowledge the congratulations for her winning the title.

Russia has seen it all. It’s the land of tsars and dictators, of both Peter and Catherine the Great, of Rasputin and Lenin, the Communist revolution, a long era of repression followed by glasnost, the end of communism, and the embrace of capitalism and self-determination. And now, to add another chapter in this country’s history, it was in Russia where we first saw a really different pageant.

An unprecedented, controversial, and reality-TV influenced production: Mrs. World 2006.

It would be an event that parlayed all of the historical karma of Russia into a telecast that caught the industry, the contestants, and the audience by surprise. Reflecting today’s top-rated TV shows and the Mrs. World Pageant organization’s decision to leave it to “the experts,” the tape-delayed telecast by the Women’s Entertainment (WE) Network in early June revealed a major shift in tone and focus, as it opted to impose a TV trend that had as yet been untested in a pageant setting — reality programming. If you already thought Russia was the land of intrigue, controversy, and a surreal reality, you were right at home with this year’s installment of Mrs. World. There would be WE cameras trained on both the graceful entrances and the tear-filled emotional confrontations backstage, as the WE producers asked the women competing — who had been training for months in every aspect of beauty, grace, and social decorum — to vote their competitors out of the competition.

Such offstage drama packaged for prime time, however, is decidedly not what pageant contestants and viewers have come to expect. Moreover, despite today’s voyeuristic television reality where reality programming is what sells, finding out who would capture the 2006 Mrs. World Pageant crown and its year-long role as an icon of married women the world over remained the real reason the 34 contestants had traveled to Russia in the first place, and why most viewers were tuning in.

Then, even that responsibility was cast into doubt with a mistaken crowning and a TV retake that threw more fuel on the fire of controversy. Questions swirled around the event even before WE’s initial telecast, prompting suspicions that the intrigue was engineered deliberately to heighten the pre-telecast buzz. If so, the tactic worked, as acrimony over the pageant reigned on Internet blogs and e-mail missives for weeks afterward, and ratings for the WE telecast package seemed to justify the strategy.

By now, the debate has faded, but inquiring minds may still want some answers. How would the reality format WE wanted to deliver for its audience mesh with the typically polished and regal stagecraft usually associated with world-class competitions? Was grace and beauty being sacrificed in the name of ratings? Would reality be a drawing card for viewers to the telecast? Internet innuendo and rumors aside, who actually was the judges’ choice? What actually transpired in the historic city of St. Petersburg, Russia, during girls’ night out? It’s time for a reality check.

Culture Shift

The competition for Mrs. World 2006 commenced with the arrival of 34 beautiful, married (for an average of six years), educated, and accomplished women, greeted by the chilly end of winter in St. Petersburg. For more than two weeks, these women from around the globe would come to embrace a culture and land that many had only dreamed of experiencing. It was adifferent people and culture (not to mention the strangely exotic Cyrillic alphabet that could be seen in all the city’s street signs and billboards), which, despite the last of a winter’s chill and the ice only now breaking up in the nearby waterways, warmly welcomed the contestants. Most of the delegates returned Russia’s warm embrace, as evidenced throughout the WE telecast.

St. Petersburg seemed to respond to pageantry’s welcome with a natural thaw all its own. The preliminary competitions were held at the host lodgings, the four-star Hotel Pribaltiyskaya, located on the Gulf of Finland. Even though the term “gulf” conjurs thoughts of warm currents, initially the Gulf of Finland was a frozen traverse that tourists and locals alike took to walking and biking upon. However, by the end of the pageant, the warming trend outdoors helped send the ice packs packing, leaving a body of water interrupted only occasionally by an ice flow.