Kopeck - Peter I

Peter I's wire kopecks — hammered from hand-drawn silver wire and struck between hand-cut dies — were a medieval technology still in use at the dawn of the eighteenth century, something Peter himself found embarrassing enough to abolish entirely by 1718. The 1702 issues fall in the transitional period when Peter had already begun Westernizing the monetary system in name but had not yet replaced the physical production method. These fish-scale-shaped flans were notoriously difficult to counterfeit convincingly, which is partly why the format survived as long as it did despite its obvious crudeness.