The Ruble: A Political History by Ekaterina Anatolʹevna Pravilova -2023- 435 pages

 I highly recommend The Ruble: A Political History to anyone with a serious interest in Pre-revoluntunary Russian History.

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 as 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. Russian imperial government considered certain financial models, such as the independence of the bank of issue, to be incompatible with the principles of autocratic monarchy. The ruble represented a projection of monarchal power and a tool of imperial expansion. Russian government used emission to finance imperial wars and prioritized geopolitical successes over economic development. 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 tutelage 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"--

The Table of Contents 

Acknowledgments

Introduction: the ruble's stories

Assignats: from paper substitutes to paper money

Autocracy or representation? the political philosophy of money in the age of Napoleon and after

The end of Assignats

Paper money in the era of the "great reforms"

Ruble's wars

Witte's rollercoaster

The autocratic standard

Practicing the gold standard

The gold syndrome

War and the end of the gold ruble

A revolution that did not happen

Epilogue: The ruble that cannot be spent

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

"She is the Rosengarten Chair of Modern and Contemporary History; Professor of History; Acting Director, Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian 

A native of St. Petersburg (Russia), Professor Ekaterina Pravilova received her Ph.D. from the Russian Academy of Sciences. She was a research scholar at the Academy of Sciences, and taught history at the European University at St. Petersburg from 2002 to 2006. She joined the faculty at Princeton in the fall of 2006. Her research interests vary greatly, ranging from the development of Russian law, economy and governance, to the study of imperial art and historiography". From The Department of History of Princeton University 

In the interest of full disclosure I was given a review copy of this book.

Mel Ulm