The Ruble: A Political History by EkaterinaPravilova. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 560 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978‐0‐19‐766371‐4

Can money have a story?"Ekaterina Pravilova asks at the outset of her "political biography" of Russia's currency.Yes, it can, and it is a fascinating one.In this meticulously researched book, she balances over two hundred years of monetary policy with discussions of the meaning of money in Russia.Debates about the ruble-whom it belonged to, what should back it, and its exchange rate-were never just about money; instead, as she shows, they were also debates about autocracy, constitutionalism, and Russia's relationship with the West, among other politically sensitive topics.The biography of the ruble, she argues, "is a history of the Russian state, written in the language of money" (p.361).In keeping with social scientists' view that money is "embedded" in social relations, Pravilova emphasizes that "monetary ideology and patterns of financial policy were always embedded in larger systems of ethics, culture, epistemology, and history" in Russia (p.8).This helps to explain the idiosyncracies of Russia's monetary system, a "world in which everything was turned upside down," as one foreign observer put it (p.76).Russia's allegiance to paper money at a time when much of the rest of the world was moving toward gold, for example, can be explained not just by its "backwardness," but by the concept of the "people's ruble."This was based upon the idea of the "Russian population's unconditional trust in any kind of monetary signs issued by the state" (p.5).The concept emerged after Catherine the Great introduced assignats, the country's first paper money, which circulated alongside the silver ruble.While the King of England borrowed money from a private bank, Russian assignats appeared to be "the state's debt to itself or, as Catherine's courtiers believed, to its people" (p.40).This inadvertently raised the question of the state's indebtedness to its own subjects.The idea of the "people's ruble" frequently came up in debates between liberals and conservatives in the nineteenth century.While liberals like Mikhail Speranskii advocated for an independent bank that held the reserve on behalf of the people, as well as for the silver standard, constitutional government, and the rule of law, conservatives like Nikolai Karamzin romanticized ordinary folk's relationship to the paper ruble and argued that "paper money based on trust and belief in the sovereign power of the tsar provided more security" (pp.44-54).The conservative view won out and the ruble assignat became "the embodiment of the bond between Tsar and his subjects," even though it was valued lower than silver ruble (pp.63-64).The concept of the "people's ruble" would often be invoked during moments of financial uncertainty, for example, when Sergei Witte pushed Russia onto the gold standard (pp.157-58).Much of the book is devoted to the story of how Russia came to reject paper assignats, as well as national alternatives to gold like platinum, and eventually joined the international gold standard in the late nineteenth century.This tale could be told as yet another example of "backward" Russia catching up to the West, or getting sucked into the gold standard's "vortex," as economists often describe its spread (p.165).However, Pravilova offers a more original interpretation showing how the adoption of gold was driven by politics and ideology.Unlike in the West, where it was

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