50 Roubles Northern Camps

GULAG camp scrip occupied a strange administrative space — it was wages, in the technical Soviet sense, since the 1930 labor code theoretically entitled prisoners to compensation, but the currency was redeemable only at camp canteens stocked with whatever the administration chose to stock. The 1937 date places this squarely within the Great Terror, when Northern Camps populations swelled fastest and the logistics of internal exchange became genuinely complicated.

Survivorship is low for obvious reasons. Prisoners had little incentive or opportunity to preserve scrip, and the camps themselves were not archiving their own economies.