Kopeck - Peter I

Peter I's wire kopecks of this period were struck using the ancient "chekanka" method — a small silver wire blank hammered between two dies, producing the characteristically irregular, fish-scale shape that had changed little since the 15th century. Peter despised them. He considered the primitive coinage an embarrassment to his modernizing ambitions and spent the years immediately following this issue engineering a complete overhaul of the Russian monetary system, culminating in the milled coinage reforms of 1700–1718 that effectively killed the wire kopeck altogether.

The 1698 date places this piece in the final years of the old system, struck just as Peter was returning from his Grand Embassy tour of Western Europe — where he had seen modern mint operations firsthand.