5.000 Rubley

This note belongs to the extraordinary burst of emergency paper issued by the Provisional Government in 1917, after the February Revolution dismantled the tsarist administration but before the Bolsheviks seized power in October. The Provisional Government inherited a treasury already gutted by three years of war finance and continued printing at pace — the State Treasury, not the State Bank, was the formal issuer precisely because the legal status of the central banking apparatus was itself in dispute.

High-denomination notes of this series were widely nicknamed "Duma money" and circulated alongside Kerensky-era small fractional notes in a collapsing monetary environment. By late 1917, inflation had made even 5,000 rubles a practical denomination rather than a large one.