The paper exploits data collected in the framework of ‘Russian firms in the global economy’ (RuFIGE) project, implemented as a part of the HSE Basic Research Program in 2014–2015. The research goals of the paper are: first, to evaluate changes in the business climate in Russia during the period of the implementation of the program aimed at the business climate improvement in 2012–2014; second, since the business environment reforms were initiated personally by Vladimir Putin, to analyze the influence of reference to the politician in the question wording on the estimates of changes in the business climate made by respondents during a survey experiment. The analysis is based on the data of the survey of managers of 1950 large, medium and small manufacturing firms in 60 Russian regions, conducted by the HSE Institute for Industrial and Market Studies in summer-autumn of 2014. The results demonstrate that firms with a longer planning horizon and firms that received support from the state are more likely to give positive assessments of the changes in the business environment. Firms with state ownership, on the contrary, more often evaluate results of the reform negatively. Firms-investors do not differ from other firms in their assessment of the business climate change. Reference to Vladimir Putin’s initiative on improving the business environment leads to a statistically significant increase in the share of positive assessments of the changes for medium enterprises with 101–249 employees, and increases the share of refusals to respond to the question for large enterprises with 500 and more employees.