10 000 Roubles Don Cossack Military Government

The Don Cossack Military Government — formally styled "Vsevelikoye Voysko Donskoye" — issued this note during the peak of the White Army's territorial control in southern Russia, when the Don region was functioning as a quasi-independent state under Ataman Pyotr Krasnov and later Alexander Bogayevsky. By 1919, the Don treasury was printing high-denomination notes largely to fund military operations against Bolshevik forces, and rampant inflation meant that what seemed an enormous sum in 1918 had already lost much of its purchasing power.

Watermarked paper was a deliberate signal of legitimacy — the Cossack authorities were acutely aware that public confidence in their scrip depended on visible security features at a time when counterfeit regional notes circulated freely across the collapsing Russian monetary system.