5000 Roubles

The RSFSR's 5000-rouble notes of 1918 were produced at a moment when the Bolshevik government was printing currency at a pace driven by civil war finance rather than any pretense of monetary stability. Goznak — the old Imperial state printing works, retained almost intact by the new regime — continued using its established watermark authentication methods, which accounts for the unusually large number of distinct signatories embedded in the watermark field. These are not signatures in the conventional sense but rather the names of Goznak craftsmen or officials incorporated into the security paper itself, a practice inherited directly from Tsarist-era note production.

The dual orientation of watermark signatures — some horizontal, some vertical — reflects different paper batches or production runs within the same issue, and Gavrilov and Schmidt appear in both orientations, suggesting they oversaw work across multiple runs.