Even in Russia a sort of equilibrium seems to have been reached. There the last phase had appeared by the middle of 1922, when a tenfold inflation in six months[13] had brought the aggregate value of the note issue below £4,000,000, which clearly could not be adequate for the transaction of the business of Russia even in its present condition. A point had been reached when the use of paper roubles was being dispensed with altogether. At about that date I had the opportunity of discussion at Genoa with some of the Soviet financiers. They have always been more self-conscious and deliberate than others in their monetary policy. They maintained at that time that, with the help of legal compulsion to employ paper roubles for certain types of transaction, these roubles could always be maintained in circulation up to a certain _minimum_ real value, however certain the public might be as to their ultimate worthlessness. According to this calculation, it would always be possible to raise (say) £3,000,000 to £4,000,000 per annum by this method, even though the paper rouble regularly fell in value at the rate of a tenfold or a hundredfold a year (one or more noughts being struck off the monetary unit annually for convenience of calculation). During the year following they did, in fact, decidedly better than this, and, by reducing the rate of inflation to a figure not much in excess of 100 per cent per three months, were able to raise the aggregate value of the note issue to more than double the lowest point reached. The equivalent of something like £15,000,000 seems to have been raised during the year (April 1922–April 1923) by this means towards the expenses of government, at the cost of having to strike only one nought off the monetary unit for the whole year![14] At the same time, in order to furnish a reliable store of value and a basis for foreign trade, the Soviet Government introduced in December 1922 a new currency unit (the chervonetz, or gold ducat), freely convertible on sterling-exchange standard principles, alongside the paper rouble, which was still indispensable as an instrument of taxation. So far this new bank note has kept respectable. By August 1923 its circulation had risen to nearly 16,000,000 having a value of about £16,000,000, and its exchange value had kept steady, the State Bank undertaking to convert the chervonetz on a parity with the £ sterling.[15] Thus by the middle of 1923 the aggregate value of the Russian note issues, good and bad money together, had risen to the substantial figure of £25,000,000, as compared with barely £4,000,000 at the date of the Genoa Conference in May 1922, thus indicating the return of confidence and the re-inauguration of a monetary _régime_. Russia provides an instructive example (at least for the moment) of a sound money for substantial transactions alongside small change for daily life, the progressive depreciation on which merely represents a quite supportable rate of turn-over tax.