5 Roubles Beresovka; PoW Camp

Beresovka (Berezovka) was a large Austro-Hungarian prisoner of war camp in Transbaikalia, Siberia, holding tens of thousands of captives during World War One. The camp's internal scrip filled a practical gap — POWs needed a medium of exchange for canteen purchases and internal labor payments, and Russian state currency was neither reliably available nor appropriate to distribute freely among prisoners. The date range spans the tsarist collapse, the Provisional Government, and the early Soviet period, meaning camp administration continued issuing these notes through extraordinary political turbulence outside the wire.

Authentication relied entirely on a handstamp and manuscript signature rather than printed security — crude by any measure, but sufficient for a closed, supervised economy.