50 Roubles

The State Treasury issues of the 1890s occupied an awkward institutional space — these were kazennye bilety, obligations of the treasury rather than of the State Bank, and technically bore interest, though by the 1890s that distinction had become largely theoretical in everyday use. The 1895 series was printed by the Expedition for the Preparation of State Papers in St. Petersburg, the same government establishment that had controlled Russian note production since 1818.

The convertibility question loomed over every treasury issue of this decade. Witte's currency reform was already in motion — the gold standard peg was formalized in 1897, making notes issued just prior to that transition an interesting marker of Russia's last years on a managed silver-adjacent system.