Kopeck - Peter I

Peter I introduced wire-money kopecks — hammered from silver rod stock and struck between crude dies — as a transitional holdover while his broader monetary reform was still underway. By 1703 he had already begun planning the milled coinage that would replace them entirely by 1718, making these late wire kopecks something of an administrative anachronism: a medieval technique being tolerated by a tsar actively dismantling medieval Russia. The Moscow mint produced them alongside the new round coinage simultaneously for several years.

The wire flan process, inherited from 15th-century practice, produced irregular slivers of silver that wearied in pockets almost immediately and were notoriously easy to clip without detection.