The Ruble

Abstract

Abstract The Ruble is a political history of Russian money from Catherine the Great to Vladimir Lenin. It traces the evolution of the Russian state and society through the analysis of monetary reforms. The Ruble argues that currency constituted an important element of Russian political organization—first, autocratic, and then socialist—while monetary reforms were considered the means of enabling or preventing political transformations. The Ruble shows how politics affected finance and explains why Russia’s financial system remained unstable for many decades. The Russian imperial government considered certain financial models, such as independence of the bank of issue, to be incompatible with the principles of autocratic monarchy. The ruble was seen as a projection of monarchal power and a tool of imperial expansion. The Russian government used issuance of money to finance imperial wars and prioritized geopolitical successes over economic development at home. Russia was the last European empire to join the gold standard system, and the gold ruble differed from other gold-based currencies of the world. The Ruble analyzes the phenomena of the “autocratic” and “Soviet” gold standards and argues that the gold-based ruble differed from other currencies of the gold-standard system. Despite the preponderance of the conservative trend in monetary policy, Russian economists, liberal politicians, and intellectuals argued for a radical reform of Russian money and wanted to liberate the ruble from the control of the state. From Catherine the Great’s reform until the 1920s, the ruble remained an object of many political programs, utopian projects, and economic ideologies.