Kopeck - Peter I

Peter I reformed Russian coinage in 1700, abolishing the old wire-money system that had persisted essentially unchanged since the fifteenth century. The tiny silver kopeck of 1703 is a transitional artifact of that upheaval — still struck by the ancient chekanka method using hand-cut wire blanks hammered between dies, even as the new round machine-struck coinage was already being introduced for larger denominations. Petersburg's infrastructure simply couldn't produce enough reformed coinage fast enough to kill the old system immediately.

Wire kopecks continued alongside round coinage until 1718, when Peter finally abolished them by decree.