2 Roubles V.I. Dal

Vladimir Dal spent decades compiling his Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language, a four-volume work containing over 200,000 words and 30,000 proverbs assembled largely without institutional support. The 2001 issue falls within Russia's long-running "Outstanding Personalities of Russia" series, which the Bank of Russia launched in the 1990s to rehabilitate cultural figures who had been marginalized or inconsistently treated under Soviet historiography. Dal — ethnically Danish by descent, yet arguably the foremost chronicler of Russian vernacular speech — was a pointed choice.