Kopeck - Peter I

Peter I's wire kopecks — struck by the ancient "scale money" technique of hammering slivers cut from drawn wire — were already an anachronism by 1698. Peter loathed them. Their irregular shape made counterfeiting trivial and their tiny size incompatible with the Western monetary system he was determined to impose on Russia. Within a decade he would abolish the denomination entirely in silver, replacing it with the copper kopeck that would anchor Russian coinage for the following century.

This piece was struck in the final years before that break — Kadashevsky mint, Moscow, hand-hammered by methods virtually unchanged since Ivan the Terrible.