2017-09-09 Sat

British museum will mark the 100th anniversary of Russian revolution with posters, medals, and banknotes depicting wonderful designs. Engraved with positivity, these banknotes showcase 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 set 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. Tom Hockenhull, the curator thinks they are beautiful.

People gave a negative feedback about the currencies and thought they were devalued. However, the banknotes are made with amazing designs and no one can ignore them.

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.

The notes on display will include a 1975 100-shilling note from Somalia, which throws light on what the state expects from women. It depicts a woman holding a gun, a shovel and a baby. Hockenhull adds that it is a message for women to do whatever they want but also take on different roles.

There will be a Yugoslavian banknote featuring the smiling, handsome epitome of a good, hard working foundry worker, Arif Heralic.

Heralic 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 Heralic’s life is less inspiring as he struggled with alcoholism and died penniless in 1971.

A 1980 50-yuan note from China depicts 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.

Hockenhull also states that most financially stable countries have boring notes, pointing out that the US had not updated its dollar since 1962 and that it was not very different from the 1862 design.

The British Museum display will include coins used in East Germany, made from aluminum and therefore absurdly light in weight to show how little value they were.

Also, joining the club 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.

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

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 the three classes of the order also got numerous benefits such as 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 rewarding subject to research. He also says that it has been a fantastic journey and wonderful to explore a window to a completely different world.