1 Chervonets, USSR, 1937

The chervonets was the currency that ended the hyperinflation. Introduced in 1922 and nominally backed by gold, it circulated alongside the collapsing rouble until the 1924 reform retired the old money altogether — a deliberate two-currency strategy that let a hard unit establish itself before the soft one was killed.

This 1937 issue is the first to carry Lenin's portrait, thirteen years after his death, and it set the pattern: every subsequent Soviet high denomination bore the same head, in the same three-quarter view, until 1991.

Its date is not incidental. 1937 is the year of the Great Terror, and several of the officials whose signatures appear on the notes in this collection — Pyatakov, Krestinsky — were shot within about a year of it.