10 Chervontsev I. V. Stalin and Mao Zedong

Arktikugol Trust — the Soviet-era coal mining company still operating on Svalbard under Norwegian sovereignty — has issued commemorative scrip-style tokens since the Soviet period, exploiting a legal grey zone that permits Russian commercial activity on the archipelago under the 1920 Spitsbergen Treaty. This piece, pairing Stalin and Mao on a single token, was issued decades after both men's deaths and long after the Sino-Soviet split had rendered such iconography politically absurd in any official context. The Trust's token series functions less as currency than as a collector souvenir operation, with no meaningful circulation in the Barentsburg mining settlement it nominally serves.