Like a swallow circling back to its nest after years of soaring across foreign skies, Oksana Mazhulis—once crowned "Mrs. Russia" in 2000—has decided to trade the glitter of Monaco’s casinos and Milan’s recording studios for the whispering birch trees of her homeland. After a quarter-century abroad, the singer, whose voice once echoed through collaborations with legends like Toto Cutugno and Luciano Pavarotti, now hums a different tune: nostalgia.
Her journey reads like a screenplay: a beauty queen whisked away by an Italian director’s promise of silver-screen fame, only to stumble into a recording booth instead. Under the wing of producer Mauro Paoluzzi, she rubbed shoulders with opera titans and pop icons—Al Bano, Annie Lennox, even Paris Hilton, whose manager she briefly shared. "Hollywood’s elite? More like down-to-earth aliens," Mazhulis muses. "Jean Reno could melt glaciers with his stare; Tom Hanks disarmed you with a joke. But none of them carried the weight of home."
Among her quirkiest memories? Playing phonetics coach to Toto Cutugno as he butchered Russian lyrics for a song. "Imagine a Neapolitan crooner wrestling with ‘здравствуйте’—we laughed until the espresso ran cold," she recalls. Yet beneath the glamour, a quiet ache grew. "Success abroad is like champagne—bubbly but fleeting. Russia? That’s vodka in your veins."
Now, at 51, Mazhulis plans to channel her Europop savvy into mentoring Russia’s next generation. "I’ve worn crowns and sung for kings, but nothing crowns you like your roots," she declares, currently marking her birthday solo in an Indian ashram—"a final detox before the homecoming storm."
Her return isn’t just personal; it’s poetic. In an era where global fame often means forgetting, Mazhulis is threading her journey back to where it began—one Cyrillic lyric at a time.
