Kopeck - Alexey Mikhailovich о М

Wire money of the mid-seventeenth century Muscovite state, struck by hammering silver rod between two dies — a technique essentially unchanged since Ivan the Terrible's monetary reform of 1535. These fish-scale kopecks circulated during Alexis's reign at a moment of acute fiscal stress: the Thirteen Years' War with Poland-Lithuania beginning in 1654 forced the government to introduce debased copper kopecks at par with silver, a policy that collapsed spectacularly in the Copper Riot of 1662. Silver wire kopecks vanished from circulation almost immediately as Gresham's Law took hold.