5 Kopecks Baku

Baku in 1918 was a city in genuine administrative chaos — briefly under the Baku Commune (a Bolshevik-dominated body), then seized by Ottoman-backed Azerbaijani forces in September, then occupied by British troops under General Dunsterville. The City Council (Gorodskaya Uprava) issued fractional notes like this one because small-denomination coinage had effectively disappeared from circulation, hoarded or melted down amid the fighting. Municipal authorities across the former Russian Empire resorted to the same stopgap during this period, but Baku's situation was unusually compressed — the city changed hands multiple times within a single year.

The lifespan of notes issued under the Uprava's authority was accordingly short.