1 Tögrög Karl Marx

Issued to mark the 170th anniversary of Marx's birth, this was part of a broader Mongolian commemorative program in the late 1980s that mirrored Soviet-bloc ideological priorities even as those priorities were beginning to collapse elsewhere. Mongolia remained a satellite state under Jambyn Batmönkh, and the coin appeared just one year before the pro-democracy protests of 1989 that would ultimately end one-party rule. The aluminium bronze alloy was a deliberate choice for commemorative weight and presence rather than circulation economy.