Commodity Tokens in Tatarstan
THIS SERIES HAS been based on the list of countries presented in the Standard Catalog of World Coins, 20thcentury edition. Over the decades the list has changed. When I started writing these there was no Kazakhstan, or Slovenia. Now there are all these other countries that didn’t used to exist.
We’ve all noticed that there is no hard and fast rule about when tokens get listed in SCWC. No rule of thumb. Why list the municipal tokens of Algerian cities but not of metropolitan France? Maybe it’s been a matter of personal interest when those new countries were first considered.
Tatarstan gets listed. Tatarstan is not a country, though for a brief period in the 20th century it claimed to be. It declared itself independent (again) in 2008, but no other country recognizes it. Administratively it is sort of the equivalent of a state in Russia, what they call the Russian Federation, because all of the supposedly autonomous Republics in the Federation are in because they want to be. Something like that.
