500 Roubles Tomsk

The Tomsk Branch of the State Bank issued this note during the civil war period when Siberia was under the control of anti-Bolshevik forces — specifically the Provisional Siberian Government, which held Tomsk through mid-1918 before the Kolchak regime consolidated authority. Regional branches were issuing their own obligations partly because supply lines to central printing facilities had collapsed entirely, and the Romanov-era monetary system had already been gutted by wartime inflation and revolution.

Local production meant crude printing by any standard. Tomsk had no facility remotely comparable to the Expedition for the Preparation of State Papers in Petrograd, and it shows. These notes circulated hard in a city that was simultaneously a major military staging point and a university town with a large refugee population.