In March 1921, officials at the United States Treasury faced an unusual problem. Gold arriving from Europe appeared suitable for purchase by the American mint. It was easy enough to test both its weight and purity, and therefore establish its value. But they didn’t want it.
The Treasury didn’t want it because the gold was Russian.
Following the Bolshevik Revolution, the United States had refused to recognise the new Soviet government, and this impacted the movement of gold. Creditors and former owners argued that some of the bullion leaving Russia had been confiscated unlawfully. Because of this, American mints and assay offices were instructed to reject gold that was either known or suspected to be of Soviet origin. Of course, as Jan Skoyles spoke in her latest YouTube video, this did not impact the value of the metal, but its history had made it commercially dangerous to trade.
So what happened when Russian gold began arriving with the official stamp of the Swedish Mint?
Russian rubles had been melted in Sweden and returned to the market under the mark of a friendly government mint. Interestingly, the US State Department decided that Swedish-stamped gold could be accepted without the same suspicion. So even though metal contained the same number of ounces and its purity remained the same, its political identity had changed which made all the difference. Russian gold had, in effect, acquired a new passport.
Historical records even capture the market adjusting as the US became more comfortable accepting this newly passport gold. Interestingly. Swedish-stamped gold had initially been available at a discount of around 8%, but once traders understood that American authorities would accept it, that discount narrowed to roughly 1%. As anyone who even vaguely understands high school economics will recall, markets eventually correct themselves, and in this case it had done so by finding its route around the obstacle.
And here we are again, just over a century later and Russian gold is travelling again, acquiring passports through other routes.
As we have covered multiple times in GoldCore TV, the invasion of Ukraine led to Russian refiners being removed from the London Bullion Market Association’s Good Delivery list. Western governments restricted dealings in newly exported Russian gold, thus closing access to London and many of the banks and intermediaries that support the world’s largest wholesale bullion market.
Russia Sent 100 Tonnes of Gold East. Is This How Dedollarisation Really Begins?
One does wonder if Western authorities really did believe that there was no possible work around for Russia, because they soon found one. During the first seven months of 2026, Hong Kong imported almost 100 tonnes of Russian-origin gold, this is nearly three times that imported in 2025. For reference, the FT reports that around $35 billion of Russian gold has passed through Hong Kong since the war began.
Once again, exclusion from one market has not destroyed the gold’s value, rather it has just encouraged the development of another workaround to find another route.
This time, the alternative involves more than a different national mint’s stamp, and the implications to the global gold market, perhaps even the international monetary system, are far greater. As we have discussed for some time, Hong Kong has been trialling a central gold clearing and settlement system connecting vaults, banks and physical transfers, these trials were stepped up earlier this year, to much fanfare. Delivery Connect links its over-the-counter market with the Shanghai Gold Exchange, alongside plans for increased vaulting, refining and physically delivered futures in dollars and renminbi.
When one talks about dedollarisation you could be forgiven for thinking it will come in the form of a state-wide address, maybe a big announcement from the G7 say but actually history shows us time and time again that new monetary systems are built from clearing rules, recognised formats, legal title, insurance and trusted places to settle a transaction. Russia is bringing its gold supply to China, China is meeting that with demand, but it is Hong Kong that is creating the bridge between them that will help the steps to a new monetary system.
Clearly there are limits to what the movement of so much Russian gold to China actually implies. We do not know that Chinese businesses accepted Russian bars directly in payment for say, machinery, services or electronics. The gold was most probably sold through intermediaries and converted into yuan or another usable currency. Commentators need to be careful to claim that this gold is replacing national currencies in everyday commerce. Instead, what it is doing is demonstrating how value can pass from one monetary network into another when conventional reserves or payment channels are unavailable.
Russian gold passed through Sweden in 1921 and is passing through Hong Kong today. In both cases, the metal survived the political argument surrounding it (as it has for thousands of years), but it needed someone to build a bridge back into commerce.
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