500 Roubles

The People's Bank of the RSFSR was abolished by decree in January 1920, folded into the People's Commissariat of Finance as a simple accounting office — the Bolsheviks at that stage considered banking itself a bourgeois institution slated for eventual elimination. Notes like this 500 Rouble issue were stopgap instruments printed on inherited Tsarist-era Goznak infrastructure while that ideological argument was still being settled.

Severe hyperinflation rendered the entire 1918 rouble series nearly worthless within a few years, and successive redenominations meant most circulated examples were heavily handled before being discarded rather than redeemed.