50 Roubles Allied Tank Bishop

Part of the Soviet "Allied War Machines" commemorative series issued in the early 1990s, this coin honors the Bishop self-propelled artillery piece supplied to Soviet forces under the Lend-Lease program. Britain delivered over 300 Bishops to the Eastern Front, though Soviet crews generally regarded them poorly — the fixed gun elevation severely limited effective range, and Red Army reports frequently contrasted them unfavorably against their own SU-76. The program nonetheless moved billions of dollars in materiel eastward between 1941 and 1945, a fact Soviet historiography was notably reluctant to acknowledge for decades.