5 Roubles Control Stamp - Type 2

Chita in 1918 was the administrative center of the Transbaikal region and, for a period, the base of Grigory Semyonov's anti-Bolshevik forces. The State Bank branch there operated in genuinely chaotic conditions — cut off from Petrograd, competing monetary authorities overlapping, and Japanese-backed Cossack troops controlling the rail lines. Local branches resorted to provisional measures simply to maintain any functional currency supply at all.

The "Control Stamp" designation is the telling detail here. These were not purpose-designed notes but existing State Bank forms with an overprint or handstamp applied locally to authorize or revalue them — a stopgap measure whose paper trail is incomplete enough that distinguishing Type 1 from Type 2 variants still generates disagreement among specialists.