3 Roubles

The 1938 Soviet note series — covering the 1, 3, and 5 Rouble denominations — was issued under the People's Commissariat of Finance rather than the State Bank, a distinction that mattered legally: these were treasury notes, not bank notes, and carried no gold backing or redemption obligation. The separation reflected ongoing ideological ambivalence within Soviet monetary policy about whether a socialist state should issue currency that admitted the existence of credit at all.

Goznak, the Soviet state printing bureau, produced the series domestically. The 3 Rouble note of this type remained in circulation well into the postwar period, surviving until the 1947 monetary reform — one of the more punishing currency conversions of the Stalin era, which exchanged old notes at 10:1.