100 Rubles 4%, specimen

This is a 4% interest-bearing treasury obligation, not a circulating banknote in the conventional sense — it functioned as a short-term government debt instrument paying quarterly coupon interest, a format the Russian Treasury used repeatedly in the early twentieth century to manage state financing without formal Duma appropriations. The 1908 series was printed by the Expedition for Preparing State Papers in St. Petersburg, the same facility that produced the empire's standard credit notes.

Specimen examples were retained by the printing house for archival and reference purposes. The "ОБРАЗЕЦЪ" overprint typically runs diagonally across both faces in red.