Unless you are of Russian / Slavic descent, or were physically there in Russia, or are interested in Russian history, I can't think of much possiblities of how one got into collecting Russian coinages.

I am not of any European descent, to be exact, 100% Asian, unless somewhere in my blood history has been altered Anyways, I must have been insane and went to Russia to study in 2000 (was it?), just because university fees are cheap (hey, cheap fees are good isn't it? )

I wasn't too smart to study ANY Russian before entering Russia and duh - I was in real trouble. I didn't even know what nyet and da was. Now putting that aside, what I found "unusual" was that I couldn't find any coins minted before 1997. Yes, I went to Russia without knowing ANY history (I should have known that it could be quite dangerous to live there!!! What great idiot am I )

This is a story while I was still in Russia - story is going to get quite long (and perhaps boring...)

If I remember right, I wasn't too keen on collecting Russian coins but just searched through the pile of change that I got. I was actually amused that I couldn't find a 1997 1 kopek coin in change. Now that wasn't a great deal until... a visit to Dom Knigi in Arbat Street changed my life. There was a numismatic section in the store and I am glad that it did have one.

If you actually visited Russia, there aren't too many souvenirs one can buy! Besides matroska, wooden carvings, cheap books, typical vodka bottles, Communist propandgas (I find them hilarious), paintings (those need legal export documentations...), winter clothes (but what's the use if they are only suited for Russian winter, unless you live in Canada or Alaska) and others that I cannot remember.

Now what I remember buying in the beginning was the 2000 55th anniversary coin set as I only found one commemorative coin in circulation (yes, I couldn't wait to find them in circulation). And that's just the beginning... next would be the Puskin, CIS, Gagarin ruble and then the 2002 Ministries 7 10 ruble set. Fair enough, that was just the start, but I was starting to get hit by the bug.

At one particular day, Dom Knigi numismatics had a major change over, and instead of loaded with common Russian, ex-soviet and world coins, it was just loaded with old Tsarist Russian silver rubles. Yes, I had no idea what they were, except, there was just plenty of zeros in the sales figures. (obviously, I didn't bother looking closely at them, but now I regret that)

A trip to the Izmailovsky park made a major change in my life. There was this set of 64 Soviet rubles that caught my attention and I remember buying them for 1000 rubles. (pretty darn cheap compared to what sellers are trying to sell them over the internet!) On the same day... special thanks to a lack of souvenirs that I could buy back home, I actually ended up buying more coins than I should have, but ended up pretty happy. I remember seeing the Soviet Olympics commemorative 28 silver coin set there too, but it was too expensive, about 250usd (I think, but that was when silver was 7usd or so - and I had zero concept of silver prices)

As of why I didn't pay any attention to Tsarist issues, I don't know why, but I guess crude copper coins didn't attract my attention although I remember a seller having a sack of copper coins and I paid zero attention to it

Having the pile of Soviet coins, I wondered how many more there could be, and that was when I bought a catalogue in Dom Knigi, "proshloe v monetah" and boy, you never know how "upset" I was when I learnt there were a lot more. (and I didn't pay attention to the precious metal commemorative coinages - or rather, I didn't even know there were such thing as palladium coins)

I later on did pay a visit to the great Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg but I went as a group tour. IF you have visited there, the scale of the museum is just... unbelievable. Can you believe that I had to run around the museum just to visit the numismatic section even though we are given one whole hour? By the way, the numismatic section for the most unbelievable reason is at the top forth floor How are you supposed to go there when there are too many pretty decorations, rooms, grand scale art to look at? I was pretty happy that I did see the massive copper plate, but I don't remember what other coins were on display... :walbash: Must have been very tired from running through the whole museum... I wish I had more time... would like to visit there again when I have the chance.

- Random Rant as these parts don't follow any order, or rather, I forgotten what order they were in -

While making some payments for fees, a visit to the Sberbank too was painfully "amusing", as some banks had commemorative coins for sale (there is one at the Shermechevo airport too), but I never dared to ask if I could buy them (and I wish I DID attempt to).

When I had to send some items back home... while using the trambus to the post office - I SAW THE MOSCOW MINT!!! Why didn't I stop there and take some photos - I don't know!!! Although it did seem to be quite spooky for some reasons...

On my last few days of leaving Russia, I ended up going to a tourist spot right behind Moscow State University and that was my first encounter with Tsarist copper issues, but those were ugly huge 5 kopeks, encrusted with green verdigris. That honestly put me off and I didn't bother looking closely at them. I ended up buying more Soviet silver coins and I honestly regret not doing so too.

And that... has started my bug in collecting Russian coins.

Hope you enjoyed my random rant of the day...

I will just say this about my collecting of Russian/Soviet coins, I was born in the wrong country. When I travelled to Russia finally, it literally was like deja vu, like I had finally gone somewhere familiar. It was just the look of the streets, the conversation etc.

I have collected Russian coins for a long time, but not very seriously until the past few years. Siberian coins have particular interests to me, and only in the past few months have I completed my type set of coins, now I am looking for upgrades.

Being a history nut, I found the USSR coinage interesting, and for years would buy every piece I could get. Then I stopped that, and now I just work on a type set, though I've pretty much lost interest in the modern stuff (post-20s)

I just kind of drifted into Russian from collecting world coins in general. I found the Russian stuff interesting and I could get some really scarce coins for surprisingly small amounts of money (that started to change beginning with the collapse of the USSR and accelerating in recent years as buyers from within Russia have become increasingly active in the market).

With so much of the good stuff headed back to Russia and the law that says the coins can't be legally exported once there, I wonder where that leaves the future of collecting Russian coins outside the home country as the supply inevitably dries up here.

During the 1990's it was fairly easy to trade coins with collectors in Russia through the mails, later on the postal authorities started inspecting packages and it was no longer safe to mail coins and paper money through the mail.

I got most of my Nicholas II coins from a collector I traded coins with in Kirov-20 near the Ural Mtns. Now it is impossible to do due to postal regulations regarding sending coins through the mail. One thing I learned from this trading experience, was my contact in Russia was very good at burying coins in the envelope so they could not be detected, something I figured out well since.

My journey into Russian coins started years ago, the first trip to college. My advisor was a history professor, with a PhD in Russian History. I had to do a paper for my World Civilizations class, so I went to talk with Dr. Hammond. I got enough info to do a smash up job on the paper, and he gave me a silver ruble,dated 1899.There in my hand was the last tsar of Russia, the whole thing kind of struck me funny. I almost felt as if I had known these people, like I'd been there. You look at Nicholas II and you can see the sadness,the tragedy in his eyes. After that, I looked for Imperial Russian coins wherever I went. I have a 1 and a half ruble from 1839, the Borodin Commemorative. It might be a phony, but it still is the most significant Russian piece I have.

In retrospect, I think that Russian coins were the first coins I ever collected as a more than "casual" collector.

The first Russian coin I ever saw was the 1913 poltina (50 kopeks) coin. Mintmaster was BC (Viktor Smirnov) -- of course, this is probably the most common issue for that type. But it was in the summer of 2002 just after my father-in-law, a Jew of Lithuanian descent living in Chicago, passed away. His mother was a refugee from that area (Lithuania) from about that time (i.e. 1910 or thereabouts). He was what I would call a "casual" collector -- had a few other coins, but nothing special. Never kept them in holders or albums, just loose. We don't know whether or not this poltina was in his mother's pocket change at the time she fled (via Hamburg/London/Toronto), or if it was given to him later on as a present. My first impulse was to look on the internet to try to find some kind of guidelines as to the condition. Only much later did I discover that there was also some stuff written on the edge...

At any rate, here we were cleaning up the house after he passed away, and there were these strange little boxes -- looked like brass jewelry boxes with strange fasteners. Inside them, we found lots of things -- that Russian coin, a George V English coin (half-crown, I believe), about a dozen low-grade and common-date USA Indian head cents, three or four elongated cents from the Chicago 1933 World Fair (I wonder what those are worth today???) and some pin-on buttons with Yiddish inscriptions celebrating prominent Jewish figures of the day. Also, I remember that there was a USA 1853 arrows-and-rays 50c coin in F-12 or worse condition, a few silver and silver-clad Kennedy halves, a silver Roosevelt dime from 1962 (?) which was almost black, and several old magazines and newspapers including LIFE magazine's coverage of the moon landing, several Chicago newspapers from the days of the Kennedy assassination, and old magazines of the "Mickey Mouse club" including some of the very first issues.

We packed everything away in boxes, and I didn't think much about these things until a year or maybe 1-1/2 yr. later. My wife was never interested in these things, but I suppose at some point she thought I needed a new hobby and remembered those coins. So one day (birthday, anniversary, I forget!) there was this present she gave me of some beautiful Canadian proof coins. They had the most beautiful colors -- I had never seen anything like it! Anyway, that got me started -- for maybe 2 weeks!

Much later, I was visiting my family in Texas and remembered that we used to have some USA silver dollars (Morgan and Peace type). My Mom got them out (about 25 coins total) as well as tons of other stuff they had collected over the years. No Russian coins, though. But lots of other USA minors (Buffalo nickels, Mercury dimes, etc.). She even found a cookie tin full of pennies which I had saved from high school -- I even found lots of nice wheaties in that one! I suppose that being a coin collector was somehow already in my bloodstream...

Well, my story is getting almost as long as gxseries! Anyway, I think that I started collecting all sorts of coins, mostly US coins, and one day I stumbled across an eBay auction for a nice grade Russian 1912 poltina and thought -- wow, this would certainly go well with my 1913 poltina! After that, there was no stopping me!

I almost forgot to mention that I had been to Russia twice before, once in 1994 and again in 1995 as a concert pianist. I was the first foreign artist to perform in Tomsk/Siberia after the opening of the city in 1993. In 1995, the orchestra toured Europe for the first time, and I helped set up some concerts for them in Switzerland. In 1994 I knew absolutely no Russian -- the conductor was Polish and spoke English very well. By 1995, I had learned a little Russian and have continued with private studies until 1999 when I had a heart attack with an ensuing triple bypass operation. I recovered completely in short order, fortunately. Unfortunately, I never made it back to Russia for a visit in the meantime.

Eventually, I hope to publish some of the recordings of the concerts we made -- we did the Brahms 2nd concerto in Bb in Basel on Nov. 7, 1995 and the Tschaikowsky 1st concerto in a town called Buchs close to Aarau in Switzerland on Nov. 14th. However, the orchestra doesn't exist anymore in the form in which it had existed when we did the performances, and I am still negotiating with the conductor as to the recording rights. (If anyone is interested, you could send me a private message and I could tell you when and where you might be able to download a file from the internet with the performances -- no promises, of course!)

(end of story -- for now!)

The law of supply and demand will cause the prices to soar even higher than they already are. I have heard that prices today in Russia for older Russian coins are two to three times what they are over here.

Taking a good look at Molotok is an excellent example of the price range... it's excessive

Think about it this way, until the 1990's collecting coins was officially forbidden. Now that doesn't mean people didn't, of course they did, they just didn't talk about it outside of a trusted network of other collectors. Now with wealth coming to Russia, people whom have not been able to collect high end stuff for so long are now buying it like no tomorrow.

I can remember Russians offering me 5 Ruble coins from Nikolai II for dollars, if they thought you were not going to turn them into the KGB, they would offer them and watches etc, anything for $$$$.

Scottishmoney, here is a question specifically for you, which I really hope you might be able to answer.

During the Soviet era, I suppose people are virtually not allowed to collect coins. But my question is: why are there numismatics books published during the Soviet era (yes, I do have a few, one going as far as 1950s if I am not mistaken). And if such books are published, wouldn't they get prosecuted, or I am taking this too far? I really have no idea what went on during that time.

Prices here in the West have already seen some stunning increases. So long as prices within Russia remain significantly higher than they are here, it is safe to say that good coins will continue to head back home (although common coins in below average condition might remain).

The difference in prices paid will likely keep the coins in Russia once they have returned. When you factor in whatever risks might be associated with trying to export the coins once they have returned home (especially considering it is illegal to do that), it seems clear that prices in the West must either go much higher (or else prices in Russia must decline significantly) before the flow of coins from the West back to Russia will slow down, let alone reverse itself.

It seems to me that the driving force behind the rocketing prices is coming from aggressive buyers from within Russia and less so from Western buyers who are merely responding to that market force. It seems clear that prices in the West must at least match, if not exceed, prices within Russia in order to keep the coins here, let alone win back those that have already left.

This then causes me to wonder about the future of collecting Russian coins here in the West. How do Western collectors continue to actively collect when faced with a continually shrinking supply of desirable and legally available coins at rapidly escalating prices?

Will the coins become so difficult to find and so expensive that Western collectors will simply give up in frustration and turn to something else, or does collecting Russian coins have a viable future here in the West?

Actually research of numismatics as a science or historical study was indeed permitted, a good thing, since in some of my collecting interests, Black Sea coins for instance, the research of Anokhin et al is now invaluable. Some of the foremost researchers were also probably secretively collecting on the side. Unfortunately when I was in Odesa, Ukraine when we went by the Numismatic Museum there, it was not open for a couple of days. I would have loved to have talked to the curators there, about collecting in general, but also during the USSR era.

I am Russian and my story is very short and not so interesting.
My first coins were a set of 1,2,3 kopeks of 1915. I traded them at school when I was 8 years old for some chewing gum. Two-headed eagle was not something you could see around back in late 70-s and the look of the coin has been holding me amazed all these years.

2 qx: Coin collecting was not forbidden in USSR, gold (and sometimes silver) trade was formally outlawed. However silver coins traded freely in my local club in middle 80-s.