1000 Roubles Samara Directory

The Samara Directory notes are a collector's trap. "Займъ Свободы" — Liberty Loan — was the Provisional Government's 1917 domestic bond issue, and these 1000-rouble instruments were originally printed in Petrograd as part of that program. After the Bolsheviks dissolved the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly — the Komuch — seized Samara in June and briefly controlled a stretch of the Volga. Existing Liberty Loan stock was pressed into emergency regional use, which is why the same printed sheet appears under multiple Pick listings depending on the overprint or issuing context.

The Komuch government lasted only until October 1918. Notes absorbed into that short window of circulation are considerably harder to attribute with confidence than they are to find.