1 Rouble Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Tsiolkovsky spent most of his productive life as a schoolteacher in Kaluga, largely self-taught and working in near-isolation, yet developed the rocket equation that underpins every orbital launch calculation used today. The Soviet state only fully rehabilitated his reputation posthumously, constructing the mythology of a socialist science hero around a man who had died in 1935 largely outside mainstream academic recognition.

Transnistria's commemorative rouble series has issued dozens of portrait pieces since the early 2000s, functioning more as controlled collectibles than circulating currency — the territory's economic isolation makes hard foreign exchange far more useful than domestic coin.