200 Roubles Novaya Zemlya

Novaya Zemlya's monetary history is unusual even by the standards of Soviet-era scrip. The archipelago served as a closed nuclear test site from 1955, and the indigenous Nenets population was forcibly relocated to the mainland in 1957 to clear the area for weapons testing — a displacement that was never reversed. The local currency tokens issued there during the Soviet period were instruments of a captive economy, redeemable only within the settlement and worthless outside it.

This 2021 commemorative revisits that history without quite confronting it.