20 Kopecks Arktikugol

Arktikugol — the Soviet coal-mining trust operating on Svalbard — issued its own scrip because Norwegian law governed the archipelago under the 1920 Spitsbergen Treaty, yet Soviet workers lived in a closed company settlement where rubles had no practical use and Norwegian krone were politically inconvenient. The trust's internal currency solved that friction without formally conceding either jurisdiction. These notes circulated exclusively at Barentsburg and, briefly, Grumant.

The 1961 series replaced an earlier issue and coincides with Khrushchev-era administrative tidying across Soviet enterprises. Low-denomination pieces like this saw the heaviest daily use in the company store and are correspondingly harder to find undamaged.