10 Kopeks Arctic Coal

Arktikugol, the Soviet state trust controlling coal extraction on Svalbard, issued these tokens for use at the company store in Barentsburg — the USSR's mining settlement on the Norwegian archipelago. Soviet workers there were paid partly in this scrip, which could not be spent outside the settlement and therefore prevented hard currency from bleeding into the Norwegian economy. The arrangement also neatly sidestepped Svalbard's peculiar legal status under the 1920 Paris Treaty, which prohibits military presence but permits commercial activity by signatory nationals.

The series was reissued across several decades with little change to the design, making precise dating of individual pieces difficult without corroborating documentation.