A new report by the World Economic Forum, an organization which holds an annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, placed Russia 114th out of 121 nations in how easy it is to trade with. According to the report, Russia apparently has problems with trade friendliness, red tape, tariffs, corruption and... roads.

We don't know about trade friendliness, but we do know about roads. Noted 19th century Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin once remarked that "Russia has two misfortunes: its roads and its fools." In the 20th century, another sentence was added to this pun: "...and the third misfortune is when the second misfortune is trying to fix the first."

This video documents that quite beautifully: road construction in Cheboksari, a tourist town on the Volga river, turns into the trap for the unsuspecting pedestrians.

Report Ranks Russia Among World's Most Closed Economies [WSJ]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124696630349505341.html?mod=googlenews_wsj