[attachmentid=2030]I'll start this off with my 1826 NGC MS67 (Hesselgesser) rouble.

Welcome to CoinPeople, Marv! Glad to see you made it here from the RCC newsgroup!
That is an awesome coin! Now I know what these are supposed to look like.

I feel lucky to have acquired it. It came up between two proofs in the "Russian Classics" Superior auction in June of 2004. The Russians were paying crazy prices for proofs, and I never thought I would be able to get this coin. It went above estimate, but not absurdly like the proofs. So I got lucky. I have become a student of "Wings Down" coins since then, and I have never seen another coin in this date that even came close to the condition of this one. One doesn't see many mint state Wings Down roubles in any event. There are a few proofs that have appeared, and naturally these tend to be better preserved since they were meant for collectors who should have taken better care than would the average person who acquired a circulation rouble. How this coin survived, I do not know, but I suspect it was a mint sample that was put away for the record and "escaped" during the early Communist Regime's many forced sales of mint or museum held coins. As best I can tell, it was not a part of the "Museum Duplicates" sales of the 1930's, as I have those catalogs.

Thanks for your comments. I will be posting more pictures of my British and Russian coins in the near future.