10 Roubles Yermak Ferroalloy Factory

One of the more unusual artifacts of Russia's post-Soviet monetary chaos, this note is an enterprise scrip — a factory-issued surrogate currency that circulated among workers at the Yermak Ferroalloy Plant in Aksu, Kazakhstan when the ruble supply collapsed and payroll in real money became functionally impossible during the early 1990s. Hundreds of Soviet-era industrial enterprises across the former USSR resorted to similar instruments, but few had the resources to commission professionally printed scrip from a foreign state printing works.

That this particular note was produced by Yugoslavia's national banknote printing facility — Zavod za izradu novčanica in Topčider — speaks to the hard-currency desperation of the moment and the surprising commercial flexibility of that institution in its final years.