War and the End of the Gold Ruble

Abstract This chapter examines the political constituents of Russia’s financial crisis during the First World War, such as the government’s conflicts with the State Duma over the gold reserve and the problems of mobilizing the population under the banner of financial patriotism. From an economic viewpoint, the Russian imperial government followed the standard script for managing war finance. To explain why the Russian ruble suffered from the war more than the currency of any other belligerent countries requires factoring in politics alongside purely economic reasons. The political crisis of the First World War revealed deep mutual distrust between the government and society. The issue of the ruble became even more politicized after the February Revolution of 1917, which brought down the tsarist government. The ruble became a trophy of a class war in which various actors—liberals and socialists, industrialists and bankers, workers and peasants—blamed each other for the ruble’s demise.