1 Rouble Kansk; PoW Camp

Kansk, a small Siberian town on the Trans-Siberian Railway east of Krasnoyarsk, held significant numbers of prisoners during the Russian Civil War period — a chaotic moment when local commanders, White Army administrators, and ad hoc committees were all improvising monetary solutions simultaneously. Camp scrip of this type was issued out of practical necessity: official Siberian currency was scarce, unreliable, or simply unavailable in sufficient quantity to handle internal camp transactions.

Locally printed under rudimentary conditions, these notes were never intended to survive. The Campbell reference documents the type, but surviving examples are genuinely rare — camp scrip was disposable by design, and the collapse of White authority in Siberia by late 1919 left no institution with any reason to preserve it.