Central Bank of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  The Central Bank of Russia was established on the 13th of July 1990. Months later, the country that created it ceased to exist.

  Neglinnaya Street in Moscow has been the bank's address since its founding. Its mandate comes from Article 75 of the Russian Constitution: protect the stability of the ruble. That charge has been tested repeatedly. Financial crises struck. International sanctions of historic scale eventually targeted the bank itself.

  The institution traces its lineage not just to 1990 but to 1860, when the Russian Empire established its first state bank. Georgy Matyukhin was its first post-Soviet head. How the bank survived the Soviet dissolution, who shaped it over decades, and what it became under modern sanctions are the questions that follow. A formal charter governing the bank's operations would not arrive until June 1991, as the Soviet state continued to fracture around it.

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• 2. Born Into the Collapse

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  In June 1990, the Russian SFSR declared sovereignty, and one of the first acts that followed was the creation of a central bank. Georgy Matyukhin moved immediately, seizing the Russian branches of the Soviet State Bank and placing them under the new institution's authority.

  A comprehensive central bank statute passed in December 1990, giving the bank its legal foundation. By then the Soviet Union was contracting. A remnant of the old State Bank continued to operate alongside the new Russian institution throughout 1991.

  In December 1991, the USSR dissolved entirely. The Bank of Russia absorbed the remaining business of the old State Bank and continued without interruption. From 1992, the bank began buying and selling foreign currency on a new exchange market. It set and published official ruble rates against foreign currencies for the first time. The 1990s would bring currency crises severe enough to call at least one former governor back for a second term.

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• 3. Who Ran the Bank

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  Sergey Ignatyev holds the record as the longest-serving post-Soviet governor: eleven years in the role, appointed three consecutive times. His predecessor Viktor Gerashchenko had served two separate stints. He stepped down in October 1994 and returned in 1998 after a ruble crisis, handing over to Ignatyev in 2002. The governor is appointed by the President of Russia and may serve multiple consecutive four-year terms.

  Elvira Nabiullina became governor on the 24th of June 2013, appointed by Vladimir Putin. The tests came quickly. In December 2014, oil prices were collapsing and capital was fleeing Russia. International sanctions added to the pressure. The bank raised its primary rate by 6.5 percentage points, bringing it to seventeen percent. A run on the ruble followed almost immediately.

  On the 29th of January 2015, the bank retreated, cutting the rate by two points to fifteen percent. In January 2015, the head of monetary policy, Ksenia Yudayeva, was replaced. Her successor, Dmitry Tulin, was seen as more receptive to the banking sector's calls for lower borrowing costs.

  Nabiullina has remained governor ever since. The challenges she would face in 2022 were of a different order entirely from anything the bank had encountered before.

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• 4. Mints, Stakes, and Reinsurance

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  In 2010, the Bank of Russia marked its hundred and fiftieth anniversary with an unusual object. A five-kilogram commemorative gold coin bearing the image of Tsar Alexander II was struck and distributed. The bank holds the exclusive right to produce all ruble currency, using mints in Moscow and St. Petersburg and the Goznak facility. It also issues commemorative coins in precious and non-precious metals, sold inside and outside Russia.

  Before the 1st of September 2013, the bank's authority covered only the banking sector. After that date, it became the mega-regulator of all Russian financial markets, taking on responsibility for banking licenses, operational rules, and accounting standards. Under Russian law, half the bank's annual profit must be channelled into the federal budget.

  The bank owns a 57.58 percent stake in Sberbank, Russia's largest commercial bank, and holds 11.779 percent of the Moscow Exchange. After the Soviet Union's dissolution, it inherited five overseas banks from the Vnesheconombank system. These were transferred by Resolution of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in 1992. They included institutions in Vienna, Luxembourg, Paris, London, and Frankfurt am Main. VTB Bank purchased all of those foreign holdings from the Bank of Russia between 2000 and 2005.

  In July 2016, the bank established the Russian National Reinsurance Company, taking a 100 percent stake in it. The company was created to handle the reinsurance of large projects that international sanctions made difficult to cover through normal channels. The construction of the Crimean Bridge was one early example. The bank's Banking Sector Consolidation Fund ran its first major rescue operation in summer 2017, taking a temporary stake in Otkritie FC Bank.

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• 5. Frozen Reserves

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  When Russian forces entered Ukraine in February 2022, the Bank of Russia held $630 billion in foreign-exchange reserves. Western governments moved to freeze them, preventing the bank from using those holdings to cushion the economic blow. On the 22nd of February 2022, US President Joe Biden announced restrictions on American engagement with the bank. The following month, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation blocked Russian securities. The Bank of International Settlements suspended the Bank of Russia in March 2022.

  Charles Michel, President of the European Council, spoke on the 5th of May 2022. He declared himself absolutely convinced that the frozen assets should not merely be held but confiscated and made available to rebuild Ukraine.

  April 2022 brought domestic inflation to 17.8 percent. The central bank cut rates in an effort to stabilise the increasingly isolated economy. The ruble, paradoxically, reached its strongest level against the US dollar in four years, which actually damaged Russian exports.

  Capital controls, which had been easing since 2006 as confidence in the ruble grew, were tightened sharply as the invasion progressed. In August 2023, the bank raised its primary interest rate from 8.5 percent to 12 percent. President Putin was reported at the time to be considering requiring Russian exporters to convert 80 percent of their foreign earnings to rubles. Western companies trying to leave Russia in October 2023 faced what was described as extraordinary capital controls, adding to the costs of their withdrawal.

  By April 2024, the export conversion measure had been extended for a further year beyond its original six-month term. Some 43 major Russian commodities groups fell under it, with the ruble trading at 93 to the US dollar. On the 15th of July 2024, the bank closed public statistics for the over-the-counter currency market under sanctions pressure. On the 26th of July 2024, the bank raised its primary rate by 200 basis points to 18 percent. Core inflation in the second quarter of 2024 had reached 9.2 percent in annualised terms, and labour shortages were growing.

  On the 13th of September 2024, the primary rate was raised to 19 percent. That same month it was reported that the bank had permitted Rosoboronexport to purchase US banknotes from the Rwandan Ministry of Defence. Russian entities were otherwise barred from holding American currency.

  On the one-thousandth day of the Ukraine war, the central bank announced that a rate cut in 2025 was possible. Stabilising inflation was cited as the reason. That cut came in September 2025, when the primary rate fell from 18 percent to 17 percent. The bank described it as part of its post-war recovery monetary policy. In December 2025, France blocked approximately $19.4 billion in frozen RCB assets held at French commercial banks. Those funds had been proposed for use in an EU loan for Ukraine.

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• 6. Fraud, Savings, and Safety

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  Lyubov Tarasova was more than a senior auditor for the Central Bank of Russia. She had been identified as a key prospective witness in improper financial affairs. She worked for the firm Unicom, which had been established on the 20th of August 1991. Her role was to check the correctness of financial documentation and the substance of transactions under suspicion. She was stabbed to death in her Moscow apartment on the 15th or the 16th of October 1997.

  In 2017, the bank partnered with the search engine Yandex on an anti-phishing initiative. Search results for companies licensed by the Bank of Russia were marked with a green circle and a tick. The label read the equivalent of "Bank of Russia Register," confirming the company held official licensing. The measure helped ordinary users identify legitimate financial businesses online.

  For 2024, Russia's minimum social pension was set at 13,269 rubles, equivalent to roughly 147 US dollars. The Bank of Russia acknowledged that state payments alone were insufficient for retirement. It began actively promoting a Long-term Savings Program in 2024, offering state co-financing alongside citizens' own contributions.

  The bank also runs the Fincult project, a website that publishes materials on financial literacy and catalogues known fraudulent schemes. Larisa Pavlova, a Bank of Russia representative, described the Long-term Savings Program's purpose in an interview with Bankiros.ru. Citizens could use the accumulated savings toward a home purchase, children's education, or an additional pension income, she said.

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