Demographically, by freeing the labour market and operating a colour-blind immigration policy, the reforms have created an increasingly cosmopolitan society.

ECONOMIST: No worries? | The

Thanks to his mother who bribed a teacher at a state school, Marc escaped the narrow confines of the world of East European Jewry, learnt to speak Russian instead of Yiddish and eventually made contact with the bourgeois, cosmopolitan society in St Petersburg.

BBC: Chagall and the art of passion and drama

But they also point to a new cosmopolitan cesspool, where a similar set of worries beset every strata of society, uniting and dividing it along new lines.

ECONOMIST: The capital as inspiration for novelists