500 Roubles Transcaspian Region - British Military Mission

In the summer of 1918, a small British force under General Wilfrid Malleson entered the Transcaspian region from Persia to counter Bolshevik and anticipated German or Turkish advances into Central Asia. With the local anti-Bolshevik Transcaspian Provisional Government desperately short of functioning currency, the British Military Mission effectively backstopped their finances — this note is a direct product of that arrangement, overprinted or stamped to authenticate existing paper for local use.

The British involvement in Transcaspia was brief, controversial, and ultimately abandoned by mid-1919. Notes issued under these circumstances circulated in an extremely limited geographic and temporal window, which accounts for their scarcity today.