Kopeck - Pyotr I

Peter I's silver kopeck of 1701 belongs to the last gasps of the old wire money tradition — the so-called "fish scale" coinage hand-struck on irregularly clipped blanks, a production method essentially unchanged since Ivan the Terrible's monetary reforms of the 1530s. Peter despised these coins, considering them an embarrassment unworthy of a modernizing empire, and spent years pushing to replace them with properly milled Western-style coinage. The transition took longer than he wanted; wire kopecks continued alongside the new issues well into the decade.