Putin sends perfume to female troops on Women's Day By Ron Popeski
MOSCOW, March 8 (Reuters) - Acting President Vladimir Putin led Russian men in showering Russia's womenfolk with gifts and compliments on International Women's Day on Wednesday, sending sets of cosmetics to female troops in war-racked Chechnya.
Russian television showed the packages, topped with yellow ribbons, being readied at Moscow's Krasnaya Zarya (Red Dawn) toiletries plant. Each was accompanied by a greeting card.
The top officer in the campaign against Chechen separatists, General Gennady Troshev, was later shown handing out the gifts, each with a single red carnation, to beaming women in uniform.
The gesture was part of the country's annual outpouring of speech-making and ritual praise for women, with heavy emphasis on their roles as mothers and homemakers.
Putin, runaway favourite to win a March 26 presidential election, had set the tone a day before in the Kremlin by presenting 20 women with awards and saying the holiday represented a ``homage'' to Russia's 78 million women.
Not to be outdone was his closest challenger, Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, who once said U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had brought shame on all women of the world for a hawkish stance on Yugoslavia that was ``against nature.''
``Woman is nature's most beautiful, most amazing creation,'' he told Ekho Moskvy radio. ``But men have not justified the trust placed in them to tackle the country's problems. How can a woman feel feminine when her husband brings home a miserable wage?''
March 8 remains one of the most important holidays after New Year in Russia and other ex-Soviet republics, cherished by women still kept well away from positions of power.
The holiday was vaunted as a symbol of Soviet-era equality of the sexes, now dismissed by many as a sham. Soviet women were subjected to heavy labour, confined to low-paid professions like teaching and medicine and had little access to methods of contraception other than abortion.
Women still bear the brunt of much post-Soviet upheaval, though some health and social issues have been addressed.
Itar-Tass news agency published a poll by the ROMIR group saying 57 percent of respondents agreed that work was ``good but what most women really want is to have a home and children.''
POSTERS PRAISE WOMEN'S QUALITIES
Posters in Moscow streets have urged men for weeks to remember ``tender and kind'' wives, girlfriends and mothers.
Men scurried through snow flurries to join queues to buy roses priced at $3 -- more than twice the normal price in a country where average monthly wages are well below $100.
In the Baltic state of Latvia, where Women's Day was abolished after independence from Soviet rule in 1991, national radio broadcast a nostalgic report about the holiday.
But Latvia's Canadian-born President Vaira Vike-Freiberga told a local news agency she saw no reason to reinstate the holiday despite appeals by leftists in the national parliament.
Flamboyant Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko greeted the holiday by announcing widespread cuts in public administration jobs to increase allocations to health care. Eighty percent of health workers are women on low pay.
He praised women in his country as a ``symbol of goodness, purity and devotion, an inspiration for poets and painters.''
But he added: ``In general, women are a source of inspiration and joy for any guy -- that is, if he is a normal guy.''