2 Hryvni Les Kurbas

Les Kurbas was the most important theatrical director in Soviet Ukrainian history — and was shot by the NKVD in 1937 at Sandarmokh, part of the mass executions now known as the Executed Renaissance. Stalin's cultural apparatus had methodically dismantled his Berezil theatre company in Kharkiv years before his arrest, reassigning actors, rewriting the institutional record, and eventually erasing his name from Soviet cultural history entirely. His rehabilitation came only in 1957, twenty years too late.

Ukraine began issuing this circulating commemorative series in the 1990s specifically to reclaim figures suppressed under Soviet rule. Kurbas was an obvious and pointed choice.