1 Rouble - Alexander II 1856

Part of the Bank of Russia's long-running commemorative restrike program, this piece reproduces the design of the coronation rouble issued in 1856 marking Alexander II's accession following Nicholas I's death during the Crimean War. Alexander's reign would open with the humiliation of the Paris Peace Treaty and end with his assassination by a Narodnaya Volya bomb on the Catherine Canal embankment in 1881 — a reign bracketed by two of the nineteenth century's more dramatic political ruptures.

The gold-plated steel format places it firmly outside numismatic currency and into souvenir territory, a format the Bank of Russia deployed extensively in the late 2000s for historical series.