Kopeck - Pyotr I

Peter I's silver kopeck of 1702 belongs to the old wire money tradition — hand-cut from drawn silver wire, hammered between dies, and irregular in shape by design. These "scales" coins, known in Russian as cheshuyky, had been the backbone of Russian small coinage for centuries. Peter despised them. He found them primitive, easily counterfeited, and an embarrassment relative to the round milled coinage of Western Europe.

He killed the series in 1718, replacing it with machine-struck round copper. The 1702 issue thus falls in the final decade of a monetary form that had survived essentially unchanged since the reign of Ivan the Terrible.