50 Roubles Tuva

Tuva — formally the Tuvan People's Republic — was an independent Soviet satellite state from 1921 until 1944, when Stalin quietly absorbed it into the USSR without the international attention that might have accompanied a larger annexation. It remains the only former independent nation incorporated directly into Russia proper rather than as a union republic, a distinction that gives it a peculiar constitutional status to this day.

The Bank of Russia's regional commemorative gold series, of which this piece is part, has produced some of the most tightly distributed issues in the modern Russian program — collector allocations were small and secondary market premiums arrived quickly.