3 Roubles Alexander the Nevsky

This coin belongs to Russia's long-running commemorative series honoring medieval princes and Orthodox saints, issued in the years immediately following Soviet collapse when the Bank of Russia was aggressively using precious-metal coinage both to generate hard currency and to reassert pre-revolutionary national identity. Alexander Nevsky's canonization by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1547 came roughly three centuries after his death at Gorodets in 1263, and Soviet authorities later rehabilitated him as a secular hero — Stalin personally approved the 1938 Eisenstein film during a period of acute German threat.