200 Roubles, Armed Forces of South Russia, 1919

This is not imperial money. It is a treasury note of the High Command of the Armed Forces in the South of Russia — the White armies under Denikin, later Wrangel — printed at Rostov-on-Don in 1919 under the direction of M. V. Bernatsky, who had been the Provisional Government's last finance minister.

It is the currency of a government that never quite existed. The VSYUR controlled large territories in southern Russia and Ukraine at its 1919 peak, took Orel and came within roughly 400 kilometres of Moscow, and needed money to pay soldiers and buy grain. So it printed some — with the double-headed eagle retained but the crown removed, the same compromise the Provisional Government had made, signalling a Russia that was neither imperial nor Bolshevik.

Its value tracked the front line. As the White advance collapsed through the winter of 1919–20 the notes depreciated to nothing, and they died completely with the evacuation from the Crimea in November 1920. Anyone still holding them held paper issued by a command that had ceased to exist.

For a collection of Russian imperial paper, a note like this is the epilogue: the same denominations, the same visual language, issued by the losing side of the war that ended the world the other notes came from.