The muted teal was mostly a quirk of the printing presses, a by‑product of the dyes they had on hand. It wasn’t a grand psychological statement, though the colour did make the notes look a bit more like a forgotten pond than a stack of cash. In short, a practical oddity with a touch of Soviet aesthetics.

I’ve seen a few more odd colour choices, but nothing that makes a whole office feel like a koi pond. Some 1930s notes had a dull green that made them look like moss on a stone wall, and a few 1970s issues sported a beige that was almost brown‑ish. All of them, though, were just the result of pigment choices and printer idiosyncrasies, not some secret underwater allegory.

Watermarks were usually a separate issue from the colour. The 1920s issues had the standard hammer‑and‑chain motif, the 1930s ones switched to a factory silhouette, and by the 1970s they were using a stylised sun. The hue of the paper didn’t change the watermark, only the design changed when the printing runs switched. So the “pond‑like” colours and the watermarks were parallel, not causal.

Sure, the factory silhouette was the main industrial nod – a stylised, almost caricatured building with a smokestack that looked like it belonged in a comic book. On the 1934 rubles you also see a pair of crossed hammers and a gear, which is basically the Soviet version of a “tools of the trade” badge. And the 1938 notes have a little icon of a tractor next to the coinage, almost like a reminder that the country was still trying to turn out peasants into mechanised workers. No other odd symbols, just the usual propaganda dressed in a slightly more modern art style.