By 1916, Russia's copper coinage had effectively vanished from circulation — hoarded, melted, or simply lost to wartime disruption. The Treasury explored several emergency alternatives, including compressed cardboard money substitutes and stamp-currency. This pattern was part of that search for a workable replacement, testing whether modified dies with a dotted field treatment might improve strike consistency on increasingly irregular planchets. It was never adopted.
By 1916, Russia's copper coinage had effectively vanished from circulation — hoarded, melted, or simply lost to wartime disruption. The Treasury explored several emergency alternatives, including compressed cardboard money substitutes and stamp-currency. This pattern was part of that search for a workable replacement, testing whether modified dies with a dotted field treatment might improve strike consistency on increasingly irregular planchets. It was never adopted.