25 Roubles

The Assignation Bank was established by Catherine the Great in 1769 specifically to issue paper money — a first for Russia — and to relieve the state of the physical burden of carting copper coin, which had become genuinely absurd in scale. A single ruble's worth of copper coin weighed around a kilogram; large transactions required carts. The assignats were intended as receipts against copper deposits, at least in theory.

Early issues including this series suffered chronic counterfeiting, serious enough that the 25-ruble denomination was suspended and redesigned more than once before the end of the eighteenth century. The state never fully solved the problem, and unchecked overprinting ultimately drove assignats to a fraction of their nominal value by the Napoleonic period.