10 Somoni

The somoni was introduced in October 2000, replacing the Tajik ruble at a rate of 1 somoni to 1,000 rubles — itself a currency that had only existed since 1995 when Tajikistan broke from the Russian ruble zone. The new denomination structure was designed partly to distance the country from the hyperinflationary chaos that had followed the 1992–1997 civil war, during which the economy contracted by roughly 50 percent.

Pick 16 is among the lower-denomination notes of the inaugural somoni series. The series was printed by Goznak, the Russian state printing enterprise, an arrangement that carried obvious political overtones for a newly independent state still heavily within Moscow's economic orbit.