the people's commissariat of finance (narkomfin) emerged as the leading bureaucratic agency seeking currency stabilization. with the value of the soviet ruble plummeting precipitously from week to week, this chief financial and budgeting agency needed a mechanism for the calculation of wages of soviet workers, which from the fall of 1921 were calculated in money rather than in-kind commodities. as a result, a new theoretical concept was created by narkomfin called the "goods ruble" or "pre-war ruble" — based upon the purchasing power of the tsarist ruble in 1913, before the distortion of the russian economy caused by the nation's descent into world war i. from november 1921 onward narkomfin pegged the value of the soviet ruble in terms of this theoretical unit each month, allowing wages to be automatically adjusted to compensated for the steadily depreciating currency.