Miss Gulag (2006) by Maria Yatskova takes to the extreme what Anton Chekhov observed during his journey through the penal colonies in 1880: after a beauty pageant in a labor camp, the winner is released. This work examines semantically and art historically the relationship between physical beauty and freedom in Miss Gulag. Against a legal background, it also provides insight into the role of the female body in Russian camp literature: rehabilitative in Fyodor Dostoevsky, transcendent in the Stalinist propaganda of the authors' collective around Maxim Gorky, and revitalizing in the dissident literature of Varlam Shalamov and Evgenia Ginzburg. The afterword concludes with a discussion of post-Soviet identity formation in relation to the Pussy Riots.