2 Roubles K.E. Tsiolkovsky

Tsiolkovsky spent most of his working life as a provincial schoolteacher in Kaluga, developing rocket theory in near-total obscurity while the scientific establishment largely ignored him. His 1903 paper outlining the rocket equation — published in a small Russian aviation journal — went unnoticed for years. The Bank of Russia's commemorative series honoring Russian scientists has drawn on figures whose reputations were substantially rehabilitated or amplified posthumously, and Tsiolkovsky fits that pattern precisely: he died in 1935 having seen little practical application of his work, yet became a foundational figure of Soviet space ideology within two decades of his death.