1000 Manat Ashgabat earthquake

The 1948 Ashgabat earthquake — officially acknowledged only after the Soviet collapse — killed an estimated 110,000 people, roughly two-thirds of the city's population, making it one of the deadliest seismic events of the 20th century. Soviet authorities suppressed casualty figures for decades, classifying the disaster partly because Stalin's own son Vasily had been present in the region. Turkmenistan's post-independence government, under Niyazov, reframed the tragedy as a founding national wound; his own mother died in the quake.

This 1998 issue appeared fifty years after the event, during Niyazov's aggressive program of commemorative gold coinage tied to nationalist mythology.