Kopeck - Peter I

Peter I's wire kopecks — the ancient chekanka technique of flattening a silver wire slug between dies — were already an anachronism by 1703, but Peter kept striking them while simultaneously building the decimal coinage system that would replace them entirely by 1718. These tiny coins served a calculated political purpose during the transition: abandoning them too quickly would have disrupted the peasant economy, which had used wire money for centuries and distrusted round milled coinage as foreign novelty.

The 1703 issue falls squarely within Peter's early reform period, the same years he was founding St. Petersburg and reorganizing the mint infrastructure along Western European lines.