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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;jackeen, post: 2493321, member: 5683&quot;]They used you to get rid of notes they were having difficulty unloading. </p><p>An expat may find himself offered all sorts of notes that the owner finds hard to monetize.</p><p>Lenin in the early 1920&#039;s introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP), that legalized some private businesses, especially those that could bring in hard currency, or actually plant a crop worth harvesting.</p><p>Later under Stalin, NEP men were retroactively redefined as economic criminals, and woe to the NEP man caught with foreign currency.</p><p>After the USSR dissolved, a house in Moscow was being remodeled. The workmen burst through a false panel into a space where stacks of British &quot;white notes&quot; - all with dates no later than 1923, but in denominations up to fifty pounds(!) along with some scarce regional&nbsp; issues - were uncovered.</p><p>Many notes were worn, brittle and/or mouse gnawed. But so what if that&#039;s the only one of two known?</p><p>It&#039;s not hard to figure out what likely occurred- entrepreneur uses international contacts to operate a business that requires a store of British pounds. Cool for a while. Lifetime in the Gulag shortly thereafter. Hand it over as ordered by Stalin&#039;s men? They&#039;ll take it and then kill you anyway. May as well make them find it. They never did.</p><p>Later, the modern discovers were afraid that the overall shabby appearance of the hoard meant they&#039;d be lucky if they got face value in sterling. They did, and were pleased.</p><p>Many others were in turn pleased, in ways little and large.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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