25 Silver Roubles

The 1840 deposit note (депозитный билет) series was introduced under Finance Minister Yegor Kankrin as part of his monetary reform, which attempted to anchor Russian paper currency to a silver standard — hence "silver roubles" rather than the assignat roubles that had been depreciating for decades. These notes were theoretically backed one-for-one by silver held in the State Deposit Bank, a claim the government struggled to honor as demand grew.

The Expedition, Russia's own state security printing works founded in 1818, produced the entire series domestically — one of the few instances where St. Petersburg could genuinely claim both design and manufacture without outsourcing to Western European specialist printers.