On Saturday, April 5, Dr. Ekaterina Pravilova presented “The Ruble: Political History and Iconography” as a part of the Russian History Museum’s Second Saturday online lecture series.

Dr. Ekaterina Pravilova traces the evolution of Russia’s monetary policy through the design of its rubles—from the reign of Catherine II to 1917.

In the Q&A, we discuss which elements of Russia’s monetary policy were adopted from the West and who was typically portrayed on Russian banknotes.

About the Speaker

Ekaterina Pravilova is a historian of Imperial and early Soviet Russia and the director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of the prize-winning A Public Empire: Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial Russia (2014) and The Ruble: A Political History (2023).

Her work explores the Russian economy, law, cultural politics, nationalism, and governance. She is working on two projects: the epistemology of truth in late Imperial Russia and the transnational history of budgets as tools for imagining financial futures.