100 Roubles, 1918, American Bank Note Company issue

A seated allegorical figure of Plenty with a cornucopia and sheaves of grain. These notes were ordered from the American Bank Note Company in New York by the Russian Provisional Government in 1917 — a government that had ceased to exist long before the printing was delivered.

The workmanship is unmistakably American: the seated allegorical figures, the steel-engraved vignettes of industry and harvest, the sharp intaglio and hard colour are the visual language of US banknotes and share certificates of the period, not of the Petrograd Expedition. Nothing else in Russian paper money looks like them.

Shipped to Vladivostok, they were issued from 1918 onward in Siberia and the Far East by whichever administration held the ports and the railway — the Provisional Siberian Government, then Kolchak's Omsk regime, then the Far Eastern authorities. They still carry the imperial gold clause, which by then was a printed fiction.