10 Roubles Barnaul; PoW Camp

Barnaul, deep in western Siberia, fell under the control of Admiral Kolchak's White Army government through much of 1919. The PoW camp there held primarily Austro-Hungarian and German prisoners from the First World War — men who found themselves stranded in Siberia as the Russian Civil War raged around them, their repatriation indefinitely suspended. Camp-issued scrip was the practical solution to an obvious problem: prisoners needed a medium of exchange for internal canteen transactions, and commanders needed to prevent hard currency from circulating inside the wire.

Locally produced under difficult conditions, the printing quality reflects its origins. The Kolchak regime collapsed in late 1919, and most prisoners were eventually repatriated through Soviet-organized exchanges — which means this scrip had an extremely short operational life.