250 Roubles, RSFSR, 1919

The 250-rouble settlement token of 1919, and one of the first RSFSR issues to abandon the vocabulary of the credit note entirely. A raschetny znak is not a banknote and does not pretend to be one. There is no promise of gold, no promise of anything but "the entire property of the Republic" — a phrase that appears on every one of them and means, in practice, nothing enforceable.

These were printed to keep a war economy moving while money itself was collapsing. By 1921 the RSFSR was running the presses faster than the notes could be counted, and the denominations climbed by orders of magnitude within months: hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, then millions. The 1922–24 reform eventually wiped the slate, exchanging these at rates that made the arithmetic of holding them absurd.

Nikolai Krestinsky signed many of them as People's Commissar of Finance. He was later ambassador to Germany, then a defendant in the 1938 Trial of the Twenty-One, where he became the only accused to retract his confession in open court before recanting the retraction the next day. He was shot that year.