Kopeck - Mikhail I о М

Mikhail Romanov's early kopecks were struck under conditions of near-total institutional collapse. The Time of Troubles had gutted the mint infrastructure, and production in the first years of his reign relied on traveling mint workers and improvised facilities in cities still recovering from Polish occupation. These wire money pieces — hand-cut slivers hammered between crude dies — continued a production method essentially unchanged since Ivan the Terrible, because no administrative capacity existed yet to reform it.

The "о М" mint mark indicates Moscow. Attribution between early Romanov kopecks is notoriously contested, with GKH and GKH2 diverging on classification precisely because die documentation from this period is fragmentary.