Alexey Mikhailovich inherited the throne at sixteen following his father Mikhail's death in 1645, and these wire money kopecks — struck by the hammered fish-scale method unchanged since Ivan the Terrible's monetary reform of 1535 — were among his first issued coinage. The technique involved cutting irregular slivers from a drawn silver wire and striking them between hand-cut dies, producing the characteristic lozenge shapes that circulated throughout Muscovy. Russia would not abandon this medieval minting method until Peter I's coinage reform of 1698.
Alexey Mikhailovich inherited the throne at sixteen following his father Mikhail's death in 1645, and these wire money kopecks — struck by the hammered fish-scale method unchanged since Ivan the Terrible's monetary reform of 1535 — were among his first issued coinage. The technique involved cutting irregular slivers from a drawn silver wire and striking them between hand-cut dies, producing the characteristic lozenge shapes that circulated throughout Muscovy. Russia would not abandon this medieval minting method until Peter I's coinage reform of 1698.