Goznak
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Goznak (Гознак in Russian, short for Государственный знак, or State Currency) was the Soviet Mint and now is the Russian Mint, responsible for producing state currency, coinage, and orders of the Ministry of Finance of the USSR. Goznak used to combine paper and printing facilities, which manufactured money, government bonds, checks, letters of credit, savings-bank books (сберегательная книжка), lottery tickets, postage stamps, blanks of passports, birth certificates, marriage licenses, as well as publications of high artistic value, special and high-grade paper. Also, Goznak controls mints, which manufactured small change, orders, decorations, and commemorative medals. It also manufacturers credit cards, banking cards, phone cards, and SIM chips. Goznak not only prints Russian money, but also prints banknotes of foreign countries, including Indonesia and Egypt.
During the reign of Peter the Great, the Russians established the St.Petersburg Mint in 1724, which would centralize coinage in Russia and begin to produce different kinds of badges and medals used for decorating. In 1818, they established the so-called Department of State Currency Production (Экспедиция заготовления государственных бумаг) under the authority of the Ministry of Finance. In 1838, a Russian academician Moritz von Jacobi (known as Boris Yakobi in Russia), employed at this Department, used his invention of galvanoplastics to produce printing plates for the first time in printing history. In the 1890s, an employee of the Department Ivan Orlov invented and developed a new printing method, which would be called the "Orlov Stamp" (Орловская печать). Also, he built multicolor printing presses, which would serve as a prototype for modern multicolor printing presses. Orlov's machines were still in use in some countries in the 1970s.
After the October Revolution of 1917, the Department of State Currency Production was reorganized and renamed Goznak (short for Государственный знак, or State Currency). In 1941, the Soviet Mint was merged with the latter. Goznak had its own All-union Research Institute in Moscow. In the 1920s, a Goznak employee and a prominent Soviet sculptor Ivan Shadr created the first samples of the Soviet money. In the 1950s – 1960s, an employee of the Goznak’s Moscow Printing Factory V.A.Oleynik invented an original money counting device, which would be further developed by other workers of the All-union Research Institute. Thus, all of the paper and printing factories and mints of the Goznak were equipped with the counting machines.
Currently, Goznak is a Russian Federal Government-owned corporation (Russian: федеральное унитарное предприятие) that consists of:
- Moscow mint
- Perm printing shop
- Saint Petersburg paper mill
- Saint Petersburg mint
- Moscow printing shop
- Research Institute of Goznak (Moscow)
- Krasnokamsk paper mill
- Moscow typography
