2 Roubles Nikolay Rerikh

Nikolay Roerich — painter, mystic, and originator of the 1935 Roerich Pact, the first international treaty specifically protecting cultural monuments during wartime — was a figure the Soviet state found ideologically awkward. This Bank of Russia commemorative, issued a year after the centenary of the journal Mir iskusstva with which Roerich was closely associated, reflects the post-Soviet rehabilitation of figures once deemed insufficiently materialist.

Roerich died in Naggar, India in 1947, having spent his final decades in the Himalayas and never returning to Russia after emigrating in 1918.