It has Cyrillic letters but an Asian looking man as the portrait. Best I could guess was Mongolia or some Soviet Asian territory, though I don't know why they'd have their own currency in 1955.
This should help: http://navonanumis.blogspot.com/2013/06/damdin-sukhbaatar-banknotes-of-hero-of.html
It is a Mongolian banknote. They did not print their own currency at that time so it was printed in the USSR.
Yep, it was a good guess. I can read a bit of Russian, not much, but just enough to pick out a few words on the note and one of the words was 'Mongol' and the website I linked above has some good details about the series..
Why mongolians of course. Only thing I can tel you about mongolia is ghenghis khan and kubai khan. Those guys had the largest empire in civilization, Record broken by ussr
Mongolia is attracting attention for its minerals. http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/country/2011/myb3-2011-mg.pdf
Haven't either of you ever had a Mongolian omelet? It's just like a Denver omelet, but the ingredients are different. Chris
Well strictly speaking that note isn't in Russian; it's in Mongolian, just happens to be written in Cyrillic. In 1941 the government mandated converting the Mongolian language into Cyrillic as part of a campaign to increase literacy (and to be fair, it was a huge success; from 1941 to 1950 the literacy went from less than 20% to almost 75%).
In any case it was a nice pickup for $1.50. I'm not a currency collector really but I buy notes that are cheap and catch my eye. I got about 8 or so at the coin show I attended on Friday.
