Siberia To-Day

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

But the monetary problem in Vladivostok is comparatively simple. This is borne in upon you when you leave the city for the interior. (If you leave on one of the innumerable Russian holidays, and all the shops are shut up, you must overeat at the “Zolotoi Roq” to get rid of that currency, but you must carry with you the paper belonging to the closed shops.) For once en route, you begin to acquire various kinds of Bolshevist money. And some of this money is good only in its particular zone. If you pass out of that zone without knowing it, you find that money worthless.

So travel through any single province is as complicated, from the standpoint of money, as if you had been passing through several different countries. Suppose the same conditions obtained in the United States. In going from New York to Philadelphia, you would have to get rid of your New York money in exchange for Philadelphia money—if you could. (Less discount for exchange.) When you reach Trenton, you wish to buy a sandwich. But the vendor will not take your Philadelphia money. So you offer a coupon off a Liberty bond—value five dollars—and receive in exchange some Trenton money, good only in Trenton. It is either that or go without the sandwich! If you travel as far as New Orleans, you have eleven kinds of money, no one kind of which has any value to you.

Returning from the Trans-Baikal, I saw a sick man attempt to purchase a bottle of milk from farm women who had set up a little market near the Androvka station. The women were peasants. Their heads were wrapped in old shawls. In the sixty-degrees-below-zero temperature, their breath came like plumes of white smoke from their nostrils. They looked at the sick man’s money and folded their arms, refusing to take it. “But it is good in Nikolsk,” he pleaded. “Then go to Nikolsk and spend it,” they returned. Shivering and hungry, the sick man climbed back into the coupé of his car. His pockets were full and his stomach was empty! He was as helpless as old King Midas.

In Siberia, a country fairly underlaid with precious metals—gold, silver, platinum and copper—there is no metal money to be seen. In fact coins are a curiosity, and even the beggar’s metal kopeck has disappeared. Where is this money? Hidden in the niches between the logs of huts, buried under frozen cabbages, sewed into ragged clothes. And anything takes its place. In Chita, in the sobrania, or city club, playing cards passed as currency—on them their denomination marked by a rubber stamp. (And now you find yourself longing for a rubber stamp!)

At one shop, I offered coupons cut from Imperial bonds. Such coupons being good everywhere, I had faith in them. But, alas, mine were declined. What did a close reading of the small Russian type reveal? The canny bond-holder had clipped his coupons and put them into circulation a little prematurely. And if I wanted to spend them, I had only to wait a small matter of six Siberian winters. The coupons were not due for payment till 1925! (If a Czar ever comes back to the throne of Russia, he is that many coupons ahead!)

The postage-stamp money is the greatest nuisance of all. It is ungummed, and may be termed cubist cash, for it is wrapped into cubes bound round by a paper band. These cubes are popularly supposed to contain two rubles’ worth of ten-kopeck stamps, and “2R” is written on each band. The trusting stranger does not question the value of the packets. Few people ever remove the bands to verify. This is left to the tireless and over-suspicious Chinese. And it is invariably your bland-faced laundryman who shows you that your packets are short. From another aspect, the broken cubes have their drawback. They are little and elusive, these stamps. Your cold fingers are all thumbs. So it is fatal to attempt to do business with stamps in a brisk wind.

The unlimited variation in money complicates every petty detail of life in Siberia. Because each purchase resolves itself into an argument over the merit of the paper you offer—or take. And I found it less wearing to wash my own handkerchiefs than to engage in a wordy battle with a Russian-speaking Chino. The illogical variation in the sizes of paper money presents complications within complications. For size, in the case of Imperials, has nothing to do with value. A thousand-ruble note is as ample as your commission from the President. Which leads you into the assumption that a small note is of small value. Not so. In this land of topsy-turvy, a twenty-or forty-ruble note is one-sixth the size of a five-ruble note. (And by virtue of somebody’s whim, a ten-ruble note is only slightly smaller than a five!) And if an Allied officer gets thoroughly acquainted with a five-ruble note, can you blame him if he tips his drosky-driver with a tiny twenty-ruble note which he mistakes for twenty kopecks?

Even in a land where unbacked money is good, there is actually some money that is bad! Siberia is papered with Imperial counterfeits. This increases the strain on the newcomer. One must become an expert in identifying money, or go broke. Some notes are good if there is a dot in one corner of the engraved border: if the dot is missing, so is the value. The counterfeit Imperial twenty-ruble notes have the zero standing straight up: the genuine have the zero a little askew—the counterfeiter having improved on the Imperial engraving!

You soon learn all sorts of devices by which you return to circulation your bad money. You contrive to pay off drosky-drivers hastily, and in dark streets. For the first time in your life you delight in tipping the hat-bandits at the doors of restaurants. By the time these rascals have discovered your iniquity, you have disappeared into the frozen night. Gamblers palm off their faulty currency in the excitement of the game, there being no time to submit the pot to cross examination. But beware, oh stranger, the too-obliging person who would turn your American money into rubles!

In addition to counterfeiting, there is another worry. The banks of some inland cities devised a method of depreciating vast quantities of Bolshevist money not held by themselves. In this way: They stamped their own; and generously offered to stamp, before a certain date, any currency that was submitted to them for marking. But the date set followed close upon the announcement, which excluded from the benefits of the plan, all persons who did not learn of the offer and so failed to have their money stamped on time. The banks, since they refused to recognize unstamped notes, now had—by this system of crossing their fingers—the bulk of the “good” money!