25 Roubles THE YERMAK'S CAMPAIGN

This coin commemorates Yermak Timofeyevich's expedition into Siberia beginning in 1581–82, financed by the Stroganov merchant family and technically an unsanctioned private military venture at its outset. Yermak's force of roughly 840 Cossacks defeated Kuchum Khan's Siberian Khanate at the Battle of Chuvashevo, opening the entire Ob-Irtysh basin to Russian expansion. Yermak drowned in the Irtysh River in 1585, his men retreating before Russian state forces returned to consolidate the conquest he had effectively handed them.

The campaign is credited with initiating Russia's eastward expansion across the Urals — a process that would reach the Pacific within sixty years of Yermak's death.