100 Roubles A. P. Chekhov

Chekhov died in 1904, and this issue marks the 150th anniversary of his birth. The Bank of Russia has produced kilogram-class silver commemoratives in this format since the early 1990s, typically in mintages under 500 pieces — low enough that secondary market examples seldom appear outside specialist Russian auctions. Chekhov's association with Sakhalin Island, documented in his 1895 nonfiction account of the penal colony there, gave him a peculiarly uncomfortable place in Soviet cultural memory: celebrated as a literary giant, yet the Sakhalin work remained ideologically awkward for decades.