20 Kopecks

Arktikugol — the Soviet state coal trust operating the mines at Barentsburg and Pyramiden on Svalbard — issued its own scrip currency because the Svalbard Treaty of 1920 prevents any single signatory from imposing its currency as the exclusive medium of exchange on the archipelago. The Soviet Union's solution was to create a parallel internal economy: workers were paid partly in this trust scrip, which was only valid within the Soviet settlements and could not leave them. It kept hard currency inside the system.

The 1979 series replaced an earlier issue and continued the same functional logic. These notes circulated in the trust's shops, canteens, and facilities at Barentsburg until the settlement's population declined sharply after the 1996 Vnukovo Airlines crash killed 141 people, most of them mine workers and their families.