Temporary certificate (Vremennoye Svidetelstvo), second issue, for one hundred shares of one hundred roubles each — ten thousand roubles, issued by the Baku-Tiflis Oil Industrial and Trading Joint-Stock Company, no. 340.

The company's articles were approved by Imperial decree on 11 January 1915, at the height of the wartime oil boom, with an authorised capital of 8,000,000 roubles. The certificate records stamp-duty receipts from the Baku Governorate Treasury, nos. 31341 and 31760, dated 13 and 15 July 1917 — between the February and October Revolutions. This is therefore a document of the very last months of Imperial Russia's financial system.

Baku was then the oil capital of the world, having supplied close to half of global production at the turn of the century and drawing the Nobels, the Rothschilds, Mantashev and Shirvanov. The company's fate was sealed by the Bolshevik nationalisation of the Baku oil industry in June 1918 and, definitively, by the Sovietisation of Azerbaijan in April 1920, which wiped out all shareholder value.

Fine green lithographic printing over a guilloché ground, corner cartouches with the БТАО monogram, text in pre-reform Russian orthography. Manuscript signatures of the Chairman of the Board, two Directors, the Accountant and the Cashier. Purple fiscal handstamp. Manuscript transfer endorsement in ink in the left margin in favour of a trading house — a provenance feature confirming the certificate actually circulated. Printed by the "Kaspiy" lithographic works, N. Ashurbekov, Baku.

The reverse carries the printed "Transfer Endorsements" table (Peredatochnyya otmetki), comprising eight frames for recording successive assignments. The first frame is completed in ink: the certificate is transferred in full ownership to a holder whose patronymic reads "Lazarevich", the transfer being entered in the registers of the Company's Board on 22 August 1924, over the signature of a board member — the same hand as on the face.

That date is the document's most striking feature: four years after the Sovietisation of Azerbaijan, the Board was still maintaining the shareholders' register. Like several Russian companies that took refuge in Paris or Constantinople, the company survived in legal exile, awaiting a restitution that never came. Few Russian certificates carry such tangible proof of this posthumous survival.

Certificates for 100 shares are markedly scarcer than single-share denominations: the high subscription amount limited the number of holders, and most were destroyed or lost during the Civil War.