Russians Vote on Ruble Symbol

WSJ: MOSCOW—Russians are voting on a symbol for their national currency in a move the central bank hopes will help raise the ruble’s profile on the world stage.

After looking at more than 1,000 options, the Bank of Russia has placed its top five picks on its website, giving Russians until Dec. 5 to vote for their favorite. Voters are given a small box to explain their choice.

The first two are variants on the Russian letter R, which in Cyrillic looks like the letter P in the Latin alphabet. The other three try to simultaneously show the Cyrillic and Latin letters for Ru.

Russia is trying to establish Moscow as a global financial center and wants to boost the ruble’s image as a currency for international trade and a potential reserve currency alongside the U.S. dollar, the euro and the British pound. That won’t be possible until 2015, when the central bank plans to fully float the ruble, meaning the exchange rate will be set entirely by the market.

“I think the introduction of a symbol for the Russian ruble will have a positive effect on our country’s image,” Pavel Krasheninnikov, a lawmaker in the ruling United Russia party, was quoted by the state news agency RIA as saying. “Over many centuries, the name of the Russian monetary unit, the ruble, remained unchanged…as the symbols of Russian power—the coat of arms, flag, national anthem—changed more than once.”

The idea of creating a symbol for the ruble emerged in the 1990s, the central bank said, encouraged by the European Union’s introduction of the euro.

Russia defaulted in 1998 and talk of a symbol lessened while Russia focused on straightening out its financial affairs.

In 2006, as Russia’s oil-fuelled economy boomed amid rising crude prices, a law was passed giving the central bank the right to choose a symbol, but no progress was made until now.

The bank said that more than 100,000 people had already voted by 6 p.m. Moscow time on Wednesday, the first day of voting. One of the symbols has received 61% of the vote, while the least popular has only 2%, the bank said, without saying which was winning.

Anton Zakharov, a trader at Promsvyazbank, said he preferred the Cyrillic letter P with a horizontal line across. “It is the most readable, recognizable, and matches the standards of the leading currencies’ symbols,” he said.

Evgeny Nadorshin, chief economist at Russia’s largest conglomerate Sistema, said he’d prefer an even simpler version: just the Cyrillic letter P, which is pronounced like the Latin R, as in ruble. “The simpler, the better,” he said.