In just six months, from the end of September 2011 to March 2012, Russia was transformed. The state's gradual decomposition - its degenerate ethos of rent-seeking and appropriation of public goods - finally pushed Russia's citizens, especially its young post-communist middle class, into the streets. Soviet-era deference to paternalistic leaders gave way to self-confidence and distrust of established authority.

Above a cheap mobile phone shop in a chaotic street in north Delhi, there is a grimy apartment whose peeling walls are decorated with photographs of adoring mothers nursing their babies. The woman cooing at her child in the biggest portrait is beautiful, white and affluent-looking - in stark contrast to the flat's five residents, four of whom are pregnant, while the other is being pumped full of hormones in the hope she will soon conceive.