3 Roubles Barnaul; PoW Camp

Barnaul, deep in western Siberia, was one of dozens of improvised PoW facilities that emerged during the chaos of World War One and its immediate aftermath. By 1919, the camp at Barnaul held primarily Austro-Hungarian and German prisoners, and the collapse of any coherent financial administration in the region — this was the height of the Russian Civil War, with Kolchak's White forces nominally controlling the area — made internal scrip a practical necessity rather than a bureaucratic formality.

These camp issues were produced locally under extremely limited means. The printing quality reflects that. Survival rates are low not because of destruction programs but simple attrition — most were discarded or lost when prisoners were repatriated or the camp dissolved.