3 Kopecks Latvia; Libava; Libau

Libava — the Imperial Russian name for what is now Liepāja — issued these municipal fractional notes in 1915 as German forces pushed into Courland and the normal flow of coinage collapsed entirely. Small-denomination copper had vanished from circulation almost immediately after war broke out in 1914, hoarded or melted, and by mid-1915 municipal governments across the Baltic were printing their own stopgaps. Libava's situation was particularly acute: the city changed hands, falling under German occupation in May 1915, which makes the precise window of this note's legitimate circulation extremely narrow.

The trilingual text — Russian, German, and Latvian — reflects the city's mixed population before occupation froze that civic reality in place.