Arktikugol — the Soviet-era coal-mining trust that has operated Barentsburg on Svalbard since the 1930s — issues these tokens as a kind of sovereign gesture, exploiting the 1920 Svalbard Treaty's provisions that grant Russian nationals the right to conduct commercial activity on Norwegian-administered territory. The trust runs its own internal scrip economy at Barentsburg, and these pieces circulate among the settlement's workers as functional currency within the compound.
Issuing a Stalin portrait piece in 2013 was a deliberate political statement, timed to the dictator's rehabilitation in certain Russian official circles under Putin-era nationalism.
Arktikugol — the Soviet-era coal-mining trust that has operated Barentsburg on Svalbard since the 1930s — issues these tokens as a kind of sovereign gesture, exploiting the 1920 Svalbard Treaty's provisions that grant Russian nationals the right to conduct commercial activity on Norwegian-administered territory. The trust runs its own internal scrip economy at Barentsburg, and these pieces circulate among the settlement's workers as functional currency within the compound.
Issuing a Stalin portrait piece in 2013 was a deliberate political statement, timed to the dictator's rehabilitation in certain Russian official circles under Putin-era nationalism.