They are banknotes that show cheerful farm workers, enthusiastic soldiers and committed intellectuals as well as foundries, factories, fields, dams, lorries, railways and guns – and they are as aesthetically pleasing as any of the world’s currencies, a new exhibition hopes to show.

The British Museum is to mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution by staging its first exhibition on communist currency.

There will be posters, medals, bonds, coins and banknotes that show bountiful agricultural productivity, major industrial progress and unmatched military prowess. “I think they are beautiful,” said the curator, Tom Hockenhull. “Especially compared to western notes of the same period, these are far nicer, far prettier.

“Even though the currencies were devalued and people were told they weren’t worth anything, the banknotes, in particular, carry some of the most glorious designs that have ever been committed to paper.”

Helped by money from the Art Fund, Hockenhull has been researching and acquiring communist currency to fill gaps in the museum’s extensive money collections.

100 Somali shillings banknote Photograph: Trustees of the British Museum

Examples of notes on display will include a 1975 100-shilling note from Somalia, which shines light on what the state expected of women. (Everything.) It shows a woman holding a gun, a shovel and a baby. “It is saying to women you can do whatever you want, you can take on all these different roles, but you’ve still got to do all this,” said Hockenhull.

There will be a Yugoslavian banknote featuring the smiling, handsome epitome of a good, hardworking foundry worker, Arif Heralić.

Heralić was part of a group of workers photographed at their blast furnace workplace in Zenica in 1954. His face stood out and the heroic image of the father-of-11 was used on Yugoslavian banknotes for more than two decades. The true story of Heralić is rather less inspiring, in that he struggled with alcoholism and died penniless in 1971.

The British Museum is marking the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Photograph: The Trustees of the British Museum

A 1980 50-yuan note from China shows the people leading the development of a modern China: a farmhand, an industrial worker and an intellectual.

The exhibition will explore how money worked under communism and its central conundrum. “Under communism, under Marxist theory, there should be no money,” said Hockenhull. “It is a social construct, it should not exist. But it is never abolished ... no state ever successfully eliminated it.”

No good Marxist would ever want a state with money but communist economies had it and the notes were so much more interesting than western ones. “It tends to follow – not always – that the most stable economies have the most boring notes, it is just the way it is,” said Hockenhull, pointing out that the US had not updated its dollar since 1962 and that it was not very different from the 1862 design.

“It is only when you have a different political agenda that you change things ... money had a different role under communism and therefore it had to look different.” A form of communism has been brought to about 20 countries around the world since 1917 and all had a currency.

Often the state’s contempt for its currency was overt. The British Museum display will include coins used in East Germany, made from aluminium and therefore absurdly light in weight to show how little value they were.

Arif Heralić on a 1,000-dinar Yugoslavian banknote. Photograph: Trustees of the British Museum

There will be a banknote from Cuba signed by the national bank president, Ernesto Guevara. He was so appalled at having to sign it he used his nickname, Che, as a way of signifying his contempt for money. “It was his two fingers to capitalism,” said Hockenhull.

Among the posters reproduced for the show will be a USSR advert for the state savings bank that avoids any mention of benefits, such as an interest rate, because the accounts were meant as a benefit to the state, not an individual.



A better way of rewarding people was with medals, which followed Stalin’s statement that the “Soviet people have mastered a new way of measuring the value of people … not in roubles, not in dollars [but] according to their heroic feats”.

One example in the show will be the Mother Heroine of the Soviet Union gold medal given to women who had 10 or more children.



Another will be an Order of Labour Glory medal issued by the USSR in Ukraine in 1985. Recipients of all three classes of the order also received a pension increase, priority on the state housing list, free public transport, a free annual pass to a sanatorium and one first-class round trip flight per year.

Hockenhull, the museum’s curator of modern currency, said it had proved a huge and rewarding subject to research. “It has been fascinating. I’m English – I grew up in a capitalist society. It has been a window into a completely different world and different way of looking at things.”

• Currency of Communism at the British Museum, 19 October-18 March.