10 Roubles Yakub Kolas

Yakub Kolas — pen name of Kanstantsin Mickiewicz — was one of the two founding giants of modern Belarusian literature, alongside Yanka Kupala. Both men spent years under Soviet suspicion; Kolas was interrogated by the NKVD in the late 1930s during the purges that decimated the Belarusian intelligentsia, yet survived where most of his contemporaries did not. He died in 1956, the same year Khrushchev delivered his secret speech denouncing Stalin.

This coin was issued as part of a broader National Bank series rehabilitating Belarusian cultural identity — a project with its own political undertow given Lukashenko's simultaneous suppression of the Belarusian language in official life.