Kopeck - Peter I

Peter I's wire kopecks — the chekanka, hand-struck from flattened silver wire blanks — were already an anachronism by 1709, a medieval technology still running in parallel with the Western-style milled coinage Peter had been aggressively introducing since 1700. The tsar despised them. He viewed the old wire money as an embarrassment to his modernizing empire, and the Kopeck Act of 1718 would finally abolish them. That this piece dates to 1709 places it in the middle of the Northern War, the same year as Poltava.