When Rostislav Ordovsky-Tanaevsky Blanco came to Moscow from Venezuela to start a restaurant chain in the Soviet Union’s dying days, doing business seemed, in some ways, a lot easier than now.
“Back then the law was very easy, very simple and very basic,” says Mr Ordovsky-Tanaevsky, whose Russian grandparents fled Russia during the Bolshevik revolution. For new foreign joint ventures, “all the existing laws did not apply”. Instead, a single three-page law governed their activity.
