Kopeck - Peter I

Peter I's wire kopecks — the chekanka series hammered from drawn silver wire — were already anachronistic by 1709, a medieval technology persisting into an empire that had just crushed Sweden at Poltava. Peter despised them, referring to the fish-scale coins as an embarrassment to a modernizing state, and had been pushing milled coinage since the reforms of 1698. The wire kopeck continued anyway, primarily because rural and low-value commerce had no viable substitute yet.

Production ended definitively in 1718 as the milled copper kopeck absorbed everyday transactions entirely.