TANNU TUVA

I WAS THINKING, after finishing Tajikistan, that we’d look at Tanzania in Africa for a while for something completely different. Those of you who have been reading my articles for a few years have perhaps noticed that I pick my countries of interest out of the 20th and 21st century Standard Catalogs of World Coins, not the earlier ones. I forgot about Tannu Tuva.

I forgive myself. The country was, in retrospect, an ephemeral political entity of the 20th century, in deep Central Asia, somewhat to the east of our recent focus.

The nation that issued the coins that we can try to collect was formally independent for a few decades before that government politely requested permission to join the Soviet Union. Its territory is now called Tuva, part of the Russian Federation, which is not just populated with Russians. And there is history for those 1934 issues that we can collect, if we want to pay that kind of money.

Until about the 1990s, no one in the “West” had