Peter I's wire kopecks — the so-called "fish scale" money — were a medieval holdover he despised but couldn't immediately abolish. These tiny hammered slivers were produced by cutting wire into slugs and striking them between hand-held dies, a technique essentially unchanged since Ivan the Terrible's monetary reform of 1535. By 1702, Peter was already engineering the decimal coinage system that would replace them entirely by 1718, making the wire kopeck's final production years simultaneous with its own planned obsolescence.
The 1702 issues are particularly associated with the Kadashevsky mint in Moscow.
Peter I's wire kopecks — the so-called "fish scale" money — were a medieval holdover he despised but couldn't immediately abolish. These tiny hammered slivers were produced by cutting wire into slugs and striking them between hand-held dies, a technique essentially unchanged since Ivan the Terrible's monetary reform of 1535. By 1702, Peter was already engineering the decimal coinage system that would replace them entirely by 1718, making the wire kopeck's final production years simultaneous with its own planned obsolescence.
The 1702 issues are particularly associated with the Kadashevsky mint in Moscow.