Kopeck - Peter I

Peter I's wire kopecks — struck by the ancient "fish scale" method of hammering slugs cut from drawn silver wire — were already anachronistic by 1702. Peter loathed them. He considered the tiny, irregular pieces an embarrassment to a modernizing empire, and within a decade he abolished the denomination entirely in favor of round, machine-struck coinage. The 1702 issues thus fall near the end of a minting tradition stretching back to Ivan the Terrible.

Dating on these pieces follows the Slavonic anno mundi calendar, rendered in Cyrillic numerals — the switch to Arabic numerals on Russian coinage came only with the reformed series after 1718.