Looking for some opinions on grade and value. 1891 rouble? 1 1

[Jason1jason]

[JKK]

Looks EFish, nice piece, willing to believe it isn't cleaned but not sure. They look to sell for $150-180 in that shape. The -script they use is really annoying, like Comic Sans Cyrillic or something.

[RWB]

A grubby EF for Tsar Alexander III, 1891. The font is an ornamental version using old letter forms. Think of it as roughly equivalent to Old English. As for value, ebay has a bunch at a little higher asking prices than JKK mentioned. But, unless you're doing a budget-minded date/moneyer set my opinion is that there are too many of these around to justify a $200 price tag. (The Soviet government put aside millions of rubles as they were removed from citizens and banks during the latter NEP period. These were sold little by little, but a great many remained after the change from Communism to Putinizm.

[Henri Charriere]

This piece need an interesting back story...

Here's one:  this was the first rouble Stalin earned as a 13-year old in old Russia before the Revolution.  He bequeathed it to his daughter who smuggled it out when she defected to the United States in the late 1970's. Provenance? Who is going to challenge Svetlana's daughter, Olga, the grand-daughter of someone whose troops overtook Berlin and defeated Germany?  She was lucky she got out of Russia alive. This guy was responsible for the deaths of 20 million people and you want documentation? This is a rouble, not a Brasher Doubloon!  [How's that sound?]

[JKK]

On 4/9/2021 at 7:13 PM, RWB said:

As for value, ebay has a bunch at a little higher asking prices than JKK mentioned.

This is unsurprising, given that I ignored current asking prices and searched only on sold listings.