The resulting runaway inflation made vodka a major means of exchange and store of value, as barter took over the economy. Things were not as bad as Weimar Germany’s hyperinflation, where the Mark went from 60 to $1 in 1921 to 4.2 trillion to $1 two years later, but a top tsarist-era economist estimated that between 1914 and 1923 the ruble depreciated by 50 million times.
