Kopeck - Alexey Mikhailovich Punched forgery

Wire money kopecks of Alexey Mikhailovich's reign were so simple to counterfeit — hand-cut slivers of silver impressed with crude dies — that the government faced a chronic forgery problem throughout the period. This particular piece is a punched forgery: a contemporary fake identified not by modern testing but by Muscovite authorities themselves, who marked detected counterfeits with a distinctive punch rather than destroying them, effectively demonetizing the coin while preserving the evidence of the crime.

The practice speaks directly to the monetary chaos following the Copper Riot of 1662, when Alexey's ill-fated experiment with copper kopecks — issued at parity with silver — collapsed catastrophically and was abandoned the following year.