10 Roubles The Sleeping Beauty

Russia's palladium coinage program of the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period was genuinely unusual — palladium was chosen partly to showcase Norilsk Nickel's dominance in global palladium production, a strategic metals story as much as a numismatic one. By 1995 the series had been running for nearly a decade, and the Norilsk connection remained the quiet industrial logic behind every issue.

Palladium coins from this period are frequently underappreciated relative to their gold and silver counterparts in the same fairy tale series.