Denga - Ivan IV Moscow

The denga was the workhorse of Muscovite small change, and Ivan IV inherited a monetary system in crisis. His mother Elena Glinskaya had launched a coinage reform in 1535 — the year this series begins — specifically to suppress the widespread clipping and counterfeiting that had degraded the existing currency. The reform standardized weights and introduced the wire-cut flan technique that would define Russian coinage for the next two centuries.

Ivan was between three and seventeen years old during this issue's production run. The coins bearing his name were struck entirely under regency governance, first Elena's, then a succession of boyar factions after her death in 1538.