Stalin's "Death Sentence" Coins: Box of 4 Russian Silver Coins (Four-Coin Box)

In 1930, in the midst of an economic crisis, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin decided that all hard-currency silver coins in circulation would be replaced by base-metal copper/nickel coins. This met with resistance, as people began to hoard the silver coins like these: 10 and 20 kopeks from the late Romanov period (1867-1917), 15 kopeks from the short-lived Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (1923-24), and 20 kopeks from the Soviet Union. -Dissatisfied with the efficiency of the mass confiscation, he went to his get-to strategy for problem solving: mass murder. Stalin wrote to his protégé, Molotov, ”The agents ”probably clamped down on a few cashiers and let it go at that… It is thus important to a) fundamentally purge the Finance [Ministry] and Gosbank (Central Bank) bureaucracy. b) Definitely shoot two or three dozen [bureaucrats]…, including several dozen common cashiers; c) continue [KGB] operations throughout the USSR that are aimed at seizing“ the silver. The Kopeks in this set are among the few, rare survivors of this period. The Soviets never again issued a circulating silver coin.