GREAT BOLSHEVIK 1907 BANK HEIST - Lenin Stalin 1905 RUSSIA 3 Rubles Banknote

Description

GREAT BOLSHEVIK BANK HEIST OF 1907
Lenin & Stalin's Tiflis Caper
Russia 3 Rubles Banknote
P-9
Image shows typical notes, not to scale and is for illustration purpose only. Actual notes will vary.
PERFECT GIFT!
Before Josef Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union, he was a bank robber. Stalin masterminded a hit on a bank on his native Georgia to fund the Revolution.
The year is 1907. Members of the radical Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, called Bolsheviks, are plotting to overthrow the autocratic regime of Tsar Nicholas II. In ten years, they will succeed beyond their wildest expectations, but for now, the revolution is not going well. They need money to finance their operations. A minority faction of the Bolshevik leadership, including Lenin and Stalin, decide that the quickest way to raise funds is to rob a bank. They tap a particularly ruthless associate, Kamo, to execute the heist.
On June 26, 1907, a stagecoach bearing new banknotes to the Russian State Bank in Tiflis—what is today Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, a city near Stalin’s birthplace—came to a stop in Yerevan Square. Kamo and his henchmen swarmed the coach and made off with some 341,000 rubles, an enormous haul. But the operation was far from smooth. Forty people were killed, mostly police and military guardsmen. Fifty more were injured in bomb blasts and gunfire. Word got out that Lenin and Stalin were among the masterminds, which jeopardized their standing with both the larger Bolshevik Party and world socialist leaders.
Then there was the ironic matter of the loot. While the take was extraordinary—.5 million in today’s dollars—most of the money was in 5,000-ruble banknotes. These were extremely large denominations, impossible to spend without attracting attention. Complicating matters, the tsarist government knew, and publicized, the serial numbers on the notes. Anyone even attempting to break a stolen banknote would be arrested. Indeed, in the aftermath of the robbery, a number of Bolshevik agents were taken into custody for doing just that. As for Kamo, he wound up getting nabbed in Germany; he was held in various prisons and mental institutions until the Revolution in 1917.
After the formation of the Soviet Union, the Communists, in a burst of revisionist history, renamed the heist the “Yerevan Square Expropriation”—quite the euphemism. Kamo was hailed as a hero, and a monument was erected in his honor in nearby Pushkin Gardens. This was exposed as the whitewash it was after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, when the monument to his crime was torn down.
This set contains a banknote of the kind that
would have been on the stagecoach bearing cash
to the Tiflis branch of the State Bank of the
Russian Empire in 1907, one of the few the
robbers would have been able to use.
The note:
Russia P-9
3 rubles
issued 1905
Russia is one of the few countries to issue a banknote in this unusual denomination.
Dimensions: 154 x 99 mm
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