Boris Godunov came to power under genuinely contested circumstances — elected tsar by a zemsky sobor after the extinction of the Rurikid line, he was the first Russian ruler without dynastic claim to the throne. The Moscow mint's wire money from his reign carries the Cyrillic initials сМ, distinguishing it from contemporaneous Novgorod and Pskov output. His reign ended with the appearance of the False Dmitry, and within months of his death in 1605 the coinage infrastructure collapsed into the chaos of the Time of Troubles.
Boris Godunov came to power under genuinely contested circumstances — elected tsar by a zemsky sobor after the extinction of the Rurikid line, he was the first Russian ruler without dynastic claim to the throne. The Moscow mint's wire money from his reign carries the Cyrillic initials сМ, distinguishing it from contemporaneous Novgorod and Pskov output. His reign ended with the appearance of the False Dmitry, and within months of his death in 1605 the coinage infrastructure collapsed into the chaos of the Time of Troubles.