25 Roubles Kherson

Kherson in 1919 was caught between multiple competing forces — Red Army, White Army, and various Ukrainian nationalist factions — and the provincial food supply apparatus issued notes like this one as a practical instrument to keep grain procurement moving when centrally-issued currency had little credibility. These food commissariat notes were essentially commodity scrip: authorization tokens within a controlled supply chain rather than general-purpose currency.

The issuing body, a provisioning commissariat rather than a bank, is the telling detail. The official stamp served as the primary authentication mechanism — a measure of improvisation that also means forgeries and over-stamped examples are not unknown in this series.