500 Roubles

Tajikistan's 1994 banknote series — of which this is the highest denomination — was issued during a period of acute monetary instability following the collapse of the Soviet ruble zone. The country had been using Russian rubles as late as 1994, and the introduction of the Tajikistani ruble that year coincided with an ongoing civil war that had begun in 1992. Hyperinflation rendered high denominations like this one functionally inadequate almost immediately after issue.

The series was printed by Goznak, the Russian state printing enterprise, an arrangement reflecting Tajikistan's continued economic dependency on Moscow even as it established nominal monetary independence.