1 Rouble Black Sea Railway

The Black Sea Railway operated a short coastal line in the Caucasus region, and by 1918 the collapse of central monetary authority had left railway administrations, municipal governments, and cooperative societies across the former Russian Empire issuing their own emergency scrip. This note is part of that broad phenomenon — bonki, as locals called such substitutes — produced when Kerensky rubles and early Bolshevik emissions were either unavailable or distrusted.

Railway-issued scrip from this period was typically redeemable only within a narrow geographic and institutional scope, which is precisely why so little survived: it had no reason to travel far, and no one outside the issuer's network had incentive to preserve it.