25 Roubles The Sleeping Beauty

Part of Russia's fairy tale series issued through the mid-1990s, this piece was struck at a moment when the Bank of Russia was aggressively building a collector coin program almost from scratch — Soviet-era numismatic issues had been tightly controlled and largely inaccessible to domestic buyers. The series drew on Ushinsky's and Afanasyev's compiled Russian folk versions of the tale rather than the Perrault or Disney iterations, a deliberate cultural positioning in the post-Soviet scramble to reassert native literary heritage.

Mintage for individual pieces in this fairy tale subseries was capped at 15,000 — modest even by contemporary Russian standards.