25 Roubles, Russian Empire, series 1909

Alexander III looks out of this note in full dress uniform, and the choice is pointed. He was the reigning tsar's father, the architect of the reaction that followed his own father's assassination, and — crucially for a banknote — the sovereign under whom the Franco-Russian alliance and the great wave of French investment began. Putting him on the 25 was a statement about creditworthiness as much as about dynasty.

The note belongs to the 1909 family that carried the empire's paper currency from the confident years into the collapse. Its gradient printing, pink through green, was technically ambitious for its day and hard to counterfeit; it is also why worn examples fade so distinctively, the rose end of the sheet going first.