It helped to spark a red revolution that swept Lenin into the Kremlin but today’s celebrations of Russian womanhood owe more to rampant capitalism than Communist solidarity.

International Women’s Day is marked with intensity in Russia, where men began a frenzy of consumption yesterday to buy expensive flowers, chocolates and perfume for the ladies in their lives.

Unlike Valentine’s Day, a recent foreign import, men are expected to buy gifts for their wives, girlfriends, sisters, daughters and female work colleagues to express their admiration for the opposite sex.

The State also joins the celebrations – banners were hung across many city streets yesterday to congratulate women on March 8, which remains a public holiday in Russia and other former Soviet republics. This tradition was established by the Communist Party in 1966 to honour the “outstanding merits of Soviet women in communistic construction, [and] in the defence of their Motherland during the Great Patriotic War”.

Women’s Day has strong revolutionary roots in Russia despite the indulgence that is now associated with the holiday. A strike by women for “bread and peace” on February 23, 1917, helped to trigger events that led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II a week later. Russia was still using the Julian calendar at that point, which coincided with March 8 on the Gregorian calendar that was in use elsewhere.

Women were given the vote by the provisional government that followed. When Lenin took power in the October revolution, Bolshevik feminists persuaded him to mark International Women’s Day officially, though it remained a day of labour.

The revolutionary roots were largely lost on the millions of Russian men who were scrambling to buy gifts yesterday, anxious only to avert any upheavals at home.

Many men are also returning the compliment that they received from women on February 23, the Defenders of the Fatherland Day. Introduced initially to honour the Red Army, it has evolved into a celebration of Russian manhood that typically involves the consumption of vast amounts of vodka.

March 8 marks the peak of the Russian flower trade, a business that imports more than £300 million worth of blooms each year. Moscow’s florists were doing a roaring trade as men queued to buy tulips and roses that cost between £1 and £2.50 a stem. Bouquets sold for between 2,000 and 5,000 roubles (£40 to £100) in a country where the average monthly salary is about 10,000 roubles. An assistant at one flower salon in Tverskaya Street, Central Moscow, reported that she had sold an orchid basket for 20,000 roubles.

Most of the city’s fashionable restaurants were booked fully, with late reservations virtually impossible to find.

The day gives a boost to the country’s booming $9 billion (£4.6 billion) cosmetics industry, though Russian men often appear as clueless as their British counterparts about what to buy for their loved ones.

As they milled around the cosmetics counters in the giant new Europeisky shopping centre in Moscow, one store assistant observed: “They do often need help.”

Around the world . . .

Iran: 33 feminists in Tehran were arrested for peaceful protests on Sunday. Student associations have been banned from organising events relating to International Women’s Day

Canada: A huge annual march and rally in Toronto will protest about gender inequalities in pay and seek to raise the minimum wage

Zimbabwe: Women will perform at a “Celebrating Womanhood” event in Harare

India: The first women-only taxi service in Bombay will be started on International Women’s Day

Israel: Palestinian and Israeli women will join a march in Jerusalem organised by the women’s organisation Bat Shalom, calling for renewed peace negotiations

Sources: www.feminist.org , AKA Italy, www.iwdtoronto.com , India PR Newswire, allafrica.com , International Herald Tribune, www.batshalom.org

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