500 Roubles Samara Directory

The so-called Samara Directory notes are among the more administratively tangled instruments of the Russian Civil War period. This 500 Rouble note belongs to the Займъ Свободы — Liberty Loan — bond series originally authorized by the Provisional Government in 1917 and printed in Petrograd before the Bolshevik coup. After October 1917, unissued stocks of these instruments circulated through successive anti-Bolshevik administrations across the Volga and Urals regions, with the Komuch government in Samara among those putting them into use.

The Pick S-prefix signals its classification as a regional issue, though the notes themselves bear no Samara overprint — attribution rests on distribution records and provenance rather than anything printed on the paper itself.