100 Roubles Samara Directory

The Samara Directory — formally the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly, known by its Russian acronym Komuch — established itself in Samara in June 1918 after Czech Legion forces seized the city from Bolshevik control. It was the first anti-Bolshevik government to issue its own currency, drawing legitimacy from the dispersed membership of the Constituent Assembly that the Bolsheviks had dissolved by force in January 1918. The 1914 date on this note is not an error — Komuch deliberately overprinted or adapted existing Imperial Russian treasury stock, borrowing the authority of pre-revolutionary paper to underpin a currency most merchants accepted only under duress.

Komuch collapsed in late 1918 when the Ufa Directory superseded it. The notes had a correspondingly brief window of use.