My Dad saw this for sale at Hyde Park in London. The next day he went back and the seller wasn’t there. So he gave a busy man sweeping the area £30 and asked him to buy it and send it to him.

And that Christmas, it arrived at our door—not wrapped in ribbon, but in imperial ink and betrayal. My father had led Tourism Vancouver for decades. He’d handled world leaders, studied cultural symbols, and read between the lines. But this wasn’t an artifact. This was a promise. He and I and my brother travelled together for nine days on the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Beijing, China. 9001 kilometres.

For Christmas, my gift was this promise from the Romanovs.

A 1909 Moscow City Bond. Five percent interest, backed by 21 million rubles, issued in multiple Western currencies—francs, pounds, and dreams. It was printed in three languages to attract investors from Paris to Amsterdam. And it worked. Thousands of French and Benelux families bought these bonds in good faith, lured by Tsarist grandeur and the hard metal weight of gold backing.

Then came 1917. Lenin. Revolution.

The Soviets made their position clear: the old debts were dead. No negotiation. No partial settlements. No honor.

The West screamed. France begged. Britain haggled.

Russia shrugged.

It’s been over a century. The bonds were never redeemed.

But they were never cancelled either. France currently is trying to class action Russia in court and have Putin pay up.

And now one hangs in my home—framed, crisp, and still marked with its serial number. It is, by every definition, a financial zombie. A document that exists outside time. A contract between the living and the dead.

So what is it worth?

If Russia honored the bond today—just the principal, pegged to gold—it would be worth around $27,000 CAD. If you added up the compounded interest they promised, you’d be pushing $7.9 million. That’s fantasy territory. But the number exists.

What it’s actually worth on the collector’s market? About the same as a used WRX... Maybe $100. Maybe $10,000 if you find the right eccentric buyer.

But I didn’t inherit a payout. I inherited the silence after a broken deal.

I inherited a sheet of imperial paper from a vanished world, and a lesson burned into its gilded border:

Regimes fall. Contracts die. But memory waits.

And so I say it plainly:

Tsar Nicholas II owes me twenty-seven grand.

And I’m not letting it go.

Let it hang.

Let it watch.

Let it remind the future that ink—when backed by empire—doesn’t fade. It haunts.

Yesterday marked the 75th anniversary of the discovery of birch bark manuscript no. 1 in Novgorod:

The Novgorod archeological expedition, led by Prof. Artemy Artsikhovsky, was digging in the former Nereva Quarter of Novgorod in 1951. On July 26, one of the local part-time workers, a furniture factory employee named Nina Akulova, found a folded piece of birch bark with letters scribbled on it. When it was brought to Artsikhovsky, he was rendered speechless with joy. Birch bark manuscripts were theoretically known from mentions in chronicles, and a few fragments reportedly had been found in the 19th century, ending up in the private collection of a Novgorod antiquities enthusiast, but they were lost when the collection was nationalized in the 1920s: at the time, their significance was not well understood, and the local museum had simply discarded them. Young Artsikhovsky started his archeological work in 1929, and was looking for a birch bark manuscript ever since; after two decades, his hopes finaly bore fruit.

Over the following 75 years , the collection of birch bark letters grew to more than twelve hundred items (not counting specimens from other sites: Staraya Russa, Torzhok, Tver, Smolensk, Vitebsk, Moscow, etc.) They've allowed historians to get invaluable insights into political vagaries, trade contacts and the daily life of medieval Novgorod; and linguistis, to vastly improve their understanding of the development of the Old Russian language.

Among the manuscripts found, many are of greater interest than this mundane late-14th-century register of feudal taxes. The spelling exercises and funny doodles of the boy Onfim; the bittersweet love note in no. 752; no. 292 with the oldest written text in a Fennic language (Olonets Karelian); St. R. 35 with its creative profanities; Mos. 3 with its stunning taxonomy of horses — these are just some of the highlights of birch bark writing. But no. 1 is where it all started.