5 Roubles Baku

Baku in 1918 was one of the most violently contested cities in the collapsing Russian imperial periphery — briefly governed by the Baku Commune under Stepan Shaumian, then seized by Ottoman-backed Azerbaijani forces in September, then briefly retaken before the British arrived in November. The City Council's emergency small-denomination notes were issued into this chaos, filling the void left by the collapse of Tsarist and Provisional Government currency supplies. Municipal bodies across the former empire improvised similarly, but few did so under such acute military and ethnic violence.

The Baku Commune's leadership — including Shaumian — was executed by the so-called Social-Revolutionary government in the same year, the "26 Baku Commissars" shot in the Transcaspian steppe. These municipal notes predate that event but exist entirely within its orbit.