100 Roubles, Russian Empire, series 1910

The Katinka is the most beautiful object the Russian imperial press produced, and at 260 by 122 millimetres it is nearly the size of a sheet of paper. Catherine the Great presides over an Art Nouveau composition of extraordinary technical ambition — multi-colour intaglio, a portrait watermark, guilloche so fine it defeated contemporary photographic reproduction.

It was also a deliberate argument. A state that could print this could not, the note implies, be one whose paper you should doubt. Issued from 1910, reprinted under Shipov through the war, it was still legal tender in name until the Soviet decree of September 1922 formally killed the imperial issues on 1 October that year.

By then a hundred pre-war roubles bought nothing at all. The note outlived its own purchasing power by several orders of magnitude, which is precisely why so many survived: at a certain point it was not worth the trouble of spending, and people kept them in drawers instead.