Actually, I want to tie up one loose end with Romania, which after all is right next door to Russia.  I got an email in which the writer noted the funny spelling of the country name on coins of the People's Republic.  1949 to 1952 it was REPUBLICA POPULARA ROMANA.  From 1952 to 1956 it was ... ROMINA.  1963 again ROMANA.  (Oh, and look, 1952 low value coins lack country name entirely.  Interesting.)  The writer of the email opined that "Romina" was an error, possibly brought about through zealous and ignorant oversight by the occupying Russians.  One of the spellings must be "wrong," right?  What kind of language has two correct ways of writing the same thing?  I thought they only did that in English.  Maybe there was an orthographic reform like they had in Netherlands in the early 20th century so the Dutch wouldn't have to plow through words with 4 "o"s in a row.
 Anyway, I don't know the answer.  Anyone who does please get in touch and I will pass it on in a future article.
 OK, let's take a flying leap eastward and plant our big coin collector feet on the black soil of the largest country in the world.  Make that "cointry."  The Russian coin market for the last year or so has been the hottest in the world.  Maybe it still is, world economy and all that.  Demand incredible.  Prices unbelievable.  Russian coins.  The place to be if the bouncers will let you in.
 I wonder if that will be true a year from now.  All of the other booms I've seen ended sooner rather than later.  Thailand, Korea, Japan, Israel (!).  What happens is that the collectors in a country develop some discretionary income and buy all the good stuff, then they buy the OK stuff, then they buy everything, then its over.  In some cases (Korea) the good stuff has not come back on the market in decades.  In others (Japan) here it all is again, normal country.  Russia is right in the middle of its boom.
 A primary peculiarity of Russian numismatics is the rather extraordinarily extensive scholarship and publication on the subject.  The main series of kopeks and rubles (world's first decimal currency system) started early in the 18th century.  The catalogs are rather detailed and exist in English versions.  Unlisted varieties are rare.  Numismatic histories are quite detailed.  Mintage records are accurate (or, at least, "accurate") back into the mid-19th century.  People write academic papers on Russian numismatics, get advanced degrees.
 And then there is that indubitable fact that Russia has been for at least 400 years an "empire," meaning that the central government had and has various overlord relationships with (lots of) other territories and peoples.
 All of these relationships have, in the long run, been defined by the Russians and imposed with force or the threat of force.  From the Russian point of view "those people" were/are all brigands and bandits who have to be policed.  That being the basic view of things, Russian government of its dependents has been rather, um, overbearing.  Of course those bottom dogs resent and grumble and plot, occasionally stage an armed rebellion, Russia rolls over them, they shut up for a while.  And periodically Russia has disintegrated to some degree, mice play until Russia finishes its internal reorganization.  Then what happens is Russia cleaning up its room, so to speak.  It is often called "Russian expansionism," which it is.  But the Russians see it as protecting their borders the only way they know how.
 We see these conflicts going on in "former Soviet Union": Chechenya, Georgia, etc.  Military activities in territories adjacent to the "Russian heartland" have been a normal feature of central Eurasian life for centuries.  Russian governance has tended to be strict, locally corrupt, ethnocentric, generally unpleasant.  Resistance has typically been crushed in a characteristically inefficient and brutal manner.  One may deplore, but that makes no difference.  Basic approaches to recurring situations persist.
 I feel the need to use most of my remaining space this month to describe the geography and to give the briefest outline of the grand sweep of Russian history.  This is necessary, in my opinion, because a discussion of the coinage before, say, 1850 will require a series of side trips into the doings of more than a few now extinct governments that endured for centuries in territories that in the Russian context are small local zones but that were larger than, say all of western Europe.  Golden Horde Mongols for example.  In the middle of Russia.  Where else to discuss them and their coins but in relation to Russia?  Crimean Tatars, more than a few other Islamic polities.  And more, much more.
 So, geography, then a brief political geography, then, when we have the haziest idea of where we are, the story of Russia and its coins.
 Russia today is the "Russian Federation," implying that the shrunken remnant of the Soviet Union, still the largest country in the world, is itself an empire, a nation of nations.  Those nations speak different languages and have different ways of doing things.  Some of those nations are on the borders of Russia proper.  Others, such as the Republic of Tatarstan, are plums in the middle of the Russian pudding.
 The country is almost twice the size of the USA.  Wikipedia describes its width as Edinburgh in Scotland to Nome in Alaska.  A lot of it is described as "inhospitable," alluding to many hundreds of thousands of square miles of swampy forests cut by canyons, mountains, badlands, non-navigable rivers that flow north into the formerly frozen Arctic Ocean.  There are zones that until recently have had permanently frozen soil.  The CIA website states that only 7% of the land is suitable for farming, but surely they are planning to increase that as the world warms, which, we see, appears to be what is happening.
 Outside of the European zone roads are few.
 Climate defines broad zones along the breadth of Russia.  Northernmost is the tundra region, substantially treeless, marshy, permafrost, or used to be.  Permafrost actually melts some feet down in the summer.  Roads turn to mud, trucks can be engulfed.  South of that is taiga, "normal" forest, the largest forest region in the world.  They don't think about conserving wood in Russia.  Further south is grassy plains, the steppe, where the action has been, historically speaking.  The land is perfect for pastoralists, some of whom migrated extensively with occasionally cataclysmic results for the settled peoples over whom they roamed.
 Mountain ranges here and there are generally not obstacles to transit because of low height and placement.  Those southern Caucasus mountains contain restive elements however, Georgians for example.  Russian armies have been tramping around there for centuries.  Always trouble.
 OK, nutshell history.
 Fact one: no one knows for sure where the Slavs who evolved into the Russians actually are from.  Someplace in southern Russia, maybe Ukraine, maybe near the Ural mountains.  I found a website about Slav DNA.  Very exclusive specialized genetic-speak.  I think I read that there is a special genotype for Slavs that has not yet been traced to a common ancester with other groups, like the Finns are linked with the Turks, or is that just linguistic?
The term "Slav" first appears in Byzantine records in the 6th century CE, and it is not certain what relation those people had with the later Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Bulgars, etc., all of whom call themselves Slavs today.
 Fact two: for thousands of years the essential human dynamic of the Russian landmass has been the impact of nomadic peoples coming out of the steppe on the farmers and merchants of the periphery.  Repeated waves of these various peoples crashed into the settlements for at least two thousand years.  It was only the development of firearms that allowed the settled peoples to gain the upper hand and to reverse the migration.  That spread of settled culture began in the 16th century and is pretty much complete today, perfect timing perhaps for another turn of the screw as the climate changes.
 More than any other country I have written about so far there is a curtain drawn over the beginnings of the human story.  They have paleolithic sites throughout Russia in the central and southern zones.  They are isolated single finds, not so unusual for human activity 30,000 years ago and more.  There are neolithic settlements from the Don river to Siberia, bronze age too, iron age too, but what do those people have to do with the Slavs who became the Russians?  Maybe not much, maybe nothing.
 Be that as it may, by the 8th century CE there were extensive settlements of Slavs along the Volga and other rivers of eastern Europe.  In due course and under various influences "governments" arose, one became more powerful than others in the 9th century, that being "Kievan Rus'" in what is now Ukraine.  That state lost its oomph due primarily to the bickering of the bigshots, the Mongols came and wiped it out in the 13th century.  Certain other polities figured out how to prosper under the Mongols, one of them was Moscow.  Over centuries Moscow took over all of its neighbors and continued doing that all the way to Alaska, which but for "Seward's Folly" would be Russian today.
 Coins do not start in Russia until the 7th century CE, and those are all foreign.  Local issues apparently not until the end of the 10th century, the famous srebreniki and zlatniki of Kievan Rus'.  Before that it was nothing numismatic.  The closest Roman coins were made in Germany.  The closest Greeks were the Black Sea coast of Ukraine.  If I was writing this in 1991 I would discuss the coins of Olbia, etc. because they were in the USSR, but now they are in another country, so I guess I'll wait a few more years or decades.
 Up there in the steppes they did not use coins much.  It took the Slavs a long time to start thinking about using them.  It was all barter to them.  There is more than a little evidence that they didn't think much of government either.  Left to their own devices they would just go on farming, no cities, no armies, but the outside world would not leave them alone.  Wave after wave of armed horsemen would appear from over the horizon, burn, steal, kill, something had to be done.  Too, there were these trader people coming down the rivers, wanting to do business, maybe buy (or steal) some extra children along with the furs that were so common, take them south, make a profit.  They would bring back the round and flat pieces of silver, copper, and gold that we like, drop off a few.  Their trading posts developed, became cities.  Eventually there were military chieftains to guard the accumulating stuff, then hereditary rulers, then politics, bureaucracy, taxes, late in the game locally produced versions of the aids-to-trade that we collect.

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RUSSIA - part 2

 In this series we look at history from a numismatic collector's view.  Not just the coins used in commerce and politics, but the possibility that we might under ideal circumstances be able to own them.  Mix of market and scholarship.  Very strange.
 From that point of view: the where and when of the coinage, it is perhaps convenient to think of Russia as a layer cake of climate zones, each with its own group of cultures and ethnic groups.  All of the ethnic and cultural groups have central concentrated zones and interact in various ways with their neighbors.
 Have to start somewhere, so I'll start in the upper west, like the land was a book, left to right across the top row of the 11 time zones, row after row of territory until we get to the people who made the coins.
 People arrived fairly late to the far north.  They tended to wander around to a greater or lesser extent, but tended base themselves in the northern taiga (forest) rather than on the tundra, because the taiga had so much more in the way of resources.  Upper paleolithic is about as old as it gets, about 15,000 years ago.  Think spears but not bows and arrows.  They hunted,  The cultures looked like what the Inuit of Alaska and Canada and Greenland did until recently.  Perhaps very late in the paleolithic period people started to domesticate dogs.
 Some thousands of years later the neolithic revolution came to the far north.  They did herding and had bows and arrows, forming cultures that worked something like the way the Sami worked until recently.  That was reindeer herding and hunting.  Probably even the earliest of those people traded furs south for southern stuff: spices, technology.  Probably so because the northernmost peoples undoubtedly came from the south, so they knew about the people they'd left behind.
 The earliest northwesterners were probably European looking.  The Sami (used to be called Laps but of late that term is thought pejorative) may be descendants of the original immigrants.
 Progressing east one would have found similar cultures conducted by different ethnic groups, perhaps northern Iranic, northern Turkic, Turko-Mongol, Mongol-Altaic, Altaic-Tungus, and then there's the Pacific, the Aleutian Islands, maybe bigger then because the sea level was lower.  Apparently reindeer domestication was practiced in far northern Europe but not in eastern Siberia.
 Cultures stayed neolithic in the far north into the 19th century.  Their economy was barter and gifting.
 Farther south the taiga gave way to the sea of grass that was the steppe, millions of square miles, low mountains here and there, a series of widely separated bodies of water.  Human culture not earlier than upper paleolithic, generally not more than 20,000 years ago.  Hunters acting like the American plains Indians of the 17th century before they got horses.  Then they got neolithic, the horse domesticated possibly 7000 years ago, possibly in Ukraine or Caucasus, possibly by proto-Slavs or their neighbors, and it was off to the races until the development of firearms.
 Mounted nomads drove their herds all over Eurasia looking for fresh pasture, colliding with each other and settled neighbors.  Their culture naturally developed in a warlike mode.  The thought process was basically that they had to keep their herds fed so get out of the way.  They tended to think about innovative possibilities in war making, since they did so much of it.  Eurasian history was a series of nomad incursions into settled zones, each event introducing new weapons.  First came the horse, then improved archery, then iron, then improved horse tack, stirrups, saddles, etc.
 South of the steppe was the fertile zone where agriculture developed.  Human settlements all the way back to the lower paleolithic, hominid evidence back 100,000 years and more, homo erectus, neanderthal.  The zone called the "fertile crescent," in the west (we call it the middle east), produced all of the earliest aspects of the culture we participate in: settled agriculture, urbanism, specialized professions, governments, organized religion, writing, science, all of it started in the fertile zone.
 Bronze technology apparently developed first in settled areas of eastern Turkey, though there is a minority opinion that Thailand preceded by a few centuries.  Ironworking was certainly in progress 3200 years ago in both Anatolia and West Africa, and there is a claim for the Ganges valley in India 600 years earlier.  Eurasian nomads picked up on the use of metal and spread it all over.
 All of that is pre-coinage and pre-Slav.  We can assume that the proto-Slavs were there in the mix, up there at the northern edge of the fertile zone, which was the southern edge of the steppe.  Maybe some of them went nomad or semi-nomad, certainly they mixed at the edges with neighbors, but overall they showed a tendency to do what they did when they appeared later as a distinctive group, which was mostly farming in small settlements, a bit of trade here and there.
 It was in the fertile zone that economic activity grew to the extent that a standardized aid to trade was needed, and in due course standard quantities of known high value objects began to be used.  Those things developed into coins, more or less simultaneously, give or take a few centuries, in coastal Asian Turkey and in central China.  That was perhaps 700 BCE.  Use of coins spread fairly rapidly in the fertile zone, so that by about 400 BC they were in use from Europe and North Africa all the way to China.
 Nomads did not take to coinage as money in the steppes, just another thing to carry around, let the wife have a few around her neck for jewelry.  But some of those nomads went south and stayed, and when they did they tended rather quickly to adopt aspects of the settled cultures they had overrun, including use of coins.  Dorian Greeks did that, Celts did that, Scythians did that, and Goths.  Part of the package was coins, so there they are: imitative coins of the nomads on their way to becoming "just like us."
 There were, at one point, Celts running around in some of the territory that is now southern Russia and northern Ukraine, but one sees very little of the imitative coinage there that is found with such frequency further west and south.  Similarly, there were Scythians, Huns, etc., whose eastern branches made and used coins in Central Asia but not in the west.  Those coins, from as far back as about 200 BCE, are from Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, petering out farther north in the countries that used to be in the Soviet Union but now are independent:: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc.  The Asian steppe proper, that part that is now Asian Russia, remained essentially coinless until the actual settlement by ethnic Russians began in the 17th century.
 Russian history proper can be conveniently taken to begin in the 6th century CE, when Slavs are first mentioned in Byzantine records.  They were living north of the Black Sea, farming and occasionally raiding into the Byzantine frontier zones.  They had been pushed south and west by population pressure and nomad migrations, and at the first Byzantine mention they crossed the border in massive numbers, part of a movement that brought them to central Europe (Czechoslovakia for example) and the Balkans.
 By the 7th century CE there were organized Slav polities in Moravia, Carinthia in Austria, and Hungary.  The Bulgars, who started out ethnically Turkic, established an empire at that time.  Over two centuries they became heavily slavicized, both culturally and genetically.
 In Ukraine a relatively densely populated Slavic zone developed along the Dnieper river.  By the 8th century these people had spread in all directions including northward into the Volga region.  By the middle of the 9th century they had organized themselves into a centralized state with a prince, and one of those princes produced coins.  The state is called Kievan Rus today.  Obviously, being a coin producer, it needs to be discussed in some detail.  But there is a bit more preliminary ground to cover, that being the milieu in which Kievan Rus developed.  Three important polities were on the ground: the Byzantines over to the southwest, Scandinavian adventurers wandering in from the north, and the Khazars, who were the actual law and order of that place and time.
 The Khazars were Turkic nomads.  Various scholars have proposed various schemes describing their origins and early ventures.  They first showed up in written records in the 6th century, when they controlled territory from Ukraine and southern Russia to Kazakhstan.  They sided with the Byzantines against the Sasanians of Iran.  They blocked a northward push by the Umayyad caliphate in the mid-7th century, and held out against the expansion of Islam in their zone through various vicissitudes until their demise.
 A peculiarity of the Khazar story is that the rulers converted to Judaism in the mid-8th century.  There is some evidence that fairly extensive conversion occurred among the common people over the next century or so.
 The Khazar realm was centrally organized with a capital, Atil, on the Volga near the Caspian Sea.  There are references to coinage in contemporary literature, and reports of Islamic style dirhams bearing the word “Al-Khazar” and others declaring that Moses is a prophet of God.  These coins are not universally accepted as Khazar products however, and have not been available on the market as far as I know.  So the question of Khazar coinage remains open, leaning toward probably.  A recent book, Coins of the Khazar Empire, by Glen Shake and Lutz Ilich, (out of print, hard to get) is presented as a catalog of these coins.  Not everyone is convinced at this point.
 The putative Khazar coins circulated along with vast piles of silver coins of the caliphs and their retainers and breakaway former vassals.  Arab dirhams of the Umayyads, Abbasids, Samanids, etc. made their way up the Volga and deep into Russia and beyond as far as Sweden.  The coins were traded for furs, amber, slaves, wax, timber.  Some were brought back by mercenaries who had received them as wages.  A lot of those mercenaries were Slavs, some of them were Scandinavians, Vikings if you will, known in that time as Varangians.
 The Scandinavian political system at that time operated with a heavy dose of primogeniture, so that the eldest son got all or most of the inheritance.  The rest of the male kids had to figure out something else to do, and many of them went wandering, many but by no means all by boat.  Heavily armed Scandinavians started showing up along the coasts of Europe, engaging initially in looting and pillage, later on settling down and taking over.  Large chunks of Ireland, Britain, French Normandy, and other regions were occupied.
 Scandinavians also went wandering east of the Baltic Sea and into the marshes of Russia, found the Volga, followed it to its mouth at the Caspian Sea, wandered down into Ukraine and the Balkans.  Some showed up in Byzantium, where they impressed the military recruiters.  A corps of Varangian guards served the emperor personally from the 9th to the 11th centuries.
 Varangians came to be the dominant element in Novgorod and Kiev in the 9th century.  Kiev was definitely Khazar at that time, Novgorod was on the border, or maybe over it.  But Khazar control of Kiev was light, and when the Varangians of Kiev started raiding into Byzantine territory as far as Constantinople it was a local effort.
 There is an “original story” of the founding of Russia called, in translation, “the Primary Chronicle.”  It tells of a Varangian named Rurik who was selected to coordinate the activities of a number of tribes around Novgorod circa 860.  From there he moved on Kiev, martially or peacefully not specified, and took over thereby most of western Khazaria.  A successor, Oleg, related to Rurik according to the Primary Chronicle, solidified the machinery of government that created what we call Kievan Rus.  He was strong enough to attack Constantinople in 907, for which he was rewarded by the Byzantines with a commercial treaty four years later.
 Kievan Rus thrived on the trade that flowed north-south and east-west through it.
 Slavicization proceeded amongst the Kievan Varangians.  In the mid-10th century prince Sviatoslav I destroyed the Khazars and gave the Bulgarians a defeat from which they never recovered, leaving Kievan Rus as the top dog in the region.
 A golden age of sorts ensued.  The princes of Kievan Rus were players who had to be taken seriously by the Byzantines and the caliphs of Baghdad.  Sviatoslav’s son was Vladimir the Great, 980-1015.  His notable achievement was the official adoption of Christianity as the state religion.  Part of the deal, as was normal at the time, was a marriage, he got the sister of the Byzantine emperor.
 Oh, yes, and he struck the first Russian coins.  Only a few, it seems, in gold and silver, his long torso on one side with the trident symbol (tamgha) that is the modern emblem of Ukraine, Jesus on the other.  It is commonly opined that these commemorated the adoption of Christianity.  The silvers are called srebreniks, which means silvers, weigh about like a contemporary dirhem but the fineness varies in the known specimens.  The golds are called zlatniks.
 A second type of srebrenik was issued later in Vladimir’s reign.  Christ is replaced with the prince’s tamgha.
 There are other coins of later princes, Sviatopolk I, 1015-18, and Yaroslav, 1019-54, also coins that read “Petros” or variant, though there was no prince of that name, all silver or billon.
 Some srebreniks of various types became briefly available on the market after the dissolution of the USSR, when everything of value was for sale.  Maybe a few dozen coins came and went.  Prices were high four figures to low five figures.  I don’t think there are any to be had at the moment.  Several hundred are known all together.  The zlatniks are all accounted for, mostly in the hands of museums, less than a dozen known.
 The princes of Kievan Rus sent out their relatives to govern the provinces, which eventually caused problems as those relatives began to put their own interests before those of the nation.  One line of rulers issued their own coins.  These were the princes of Tmutarakan on the Taman peninsula in the Black Sea east of Crimea.  The coins, are named to Mstislav, 988-1036, are billon or copper, crudely imitate contemporary Byzantine miliaresions.  They are as rare as the Kievan srebreniki, but didn’t get as much because less famous and, after all, were base.  None to be had today.
 To round out the numismatic picture for the period I refer you to http://www.russian-coins.net/auc7tob7.htm, where you can see pictures of imitation Arab dirhams with meaningless “legends” found near Chernigov in Ukraine.  This points to the central fact of coinage in Kievan Rus, which was, on the street, all Arab and Byzantine.  And worthwhile remembering that coins were for towns and international trade.  Out in the country it was all barter.
 Kievan Rus began to develop internal problems due to the growth of power centers in the provinces.  Internal disorder was accompanied by commercial decline after the arrival of the Seljuk Turks in Iran disrupted trade routes.  Further disruption eventuated from the European response to Seljuk efforts to tighten things up, which was the Crusades.  By the time the Mongols arrived to turn the page Kievan unity was gone, leaving independent cities like Novgorod and a bunch of local princes.

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RUSSIA - part 3

 More old business.  I was provided the answer to my question on Romanian spelling in the 1950s and '60s by Mr. Brad Vrebete and a confirmation by another.  There is actually a Wikipedia article.  Briefly, yes, indeed, the change in spelling of the national entity from Romania to Republica Romana to Romina back to Romana again was political.  The occupying Russians thought "Romina" referenced the Slavic connection of Romania, so the spelling became part of its propaganda.  It became Romana again when the nationalists took over.  Write me for more of the story.
 OK, back to Russia , late 1100s, just before the Mongols came.  We need to look at the geography again, the eleven time zones west to east, the grass covered hills and plains of the steppe in the south to the tundra in the north.
 Look, “Russia” is gigantic and multidimensional.  Lots of different things are going on all the time, too many to mention everything.  It is just impossible, no matter how much detail one goes into, something will go unnoticed, often something big.  It is a big, big country, with an infrastructure at about the level of Alaska for most of the country.
 Russia today has about 145 million citizens, about 80% ethnic Russian.  Most of the other ethnic groups were conquered in one way or another, some have had a long history of bellicosity.  Someone should analyze all of the known military engagements within the borders of modern Russia for peaceful periods.  My guess is that no 10 years of consecutive peace will be found.
 We were discussing Kievan Rus, how it became strong then became decadent and fell apart.  That’s southern Russia and Ukraine,  They did agriculture and trade, with Europe and the middle east and with Asia.  And they sent agents out into the steppe as far as the Urals, to get furs mostly.
 East of the Urals was Asia.  It wasn’t so much the mountains, which are low and gentle, that made it not-Europe.  Rather it was the people.  They looked this or that way that was different from the people to the west, they did things this or that different way.  The people on both sides felt like that, very much “us and them.”  (Not that they weren’t all the time fighting among themselves on both sides of the mountains!)
 East of the Urals is now called “Siberia.“  The name comes from a Turkish Khanate overthrown by a Russian expedition in 1580.  It came to mean all of the territory to the Pacific Ocean.  Then, only a few years ago, greater Siberia was split into two “federal districts,“ Siberia, and the Far East.  Those 2 federal districts account for 2/3 of the territory the Russian Federation.
 The Russian Federation is composed of many ethnic groups, many with officially recognized home territories.  Wikipedia lists 93 groups from the Russian census, each with an administrative homeland and a recognized cultural identity and various formal guarantees pertaining (regardless of what kind of hard time they might be having in real life.)  A lot of them, probably most, did not used to live where they do now, there has been a lot of moving around, quite a few of those ethnic groups were nomads for centuries or millennia.  Others were conquered and deported from where they used to be to someplace else.  Or they were administratively assigned for various reasons.  And through all of that mass moving around there has been a movement of individuals of all kinds of ethnic groups following their individual stars where they happened to lead.
 In the west, if things got bad, maybe you could head east, cross the low Ural mountains, and disappear into the vastness.  Maybe you'd avoid the nomads, or maybe they’d adopt you, maybe you could carry on, away from those overbearing busybodies who wanted to run your life for their benefit back in Kievan Rus.
 In the 10th century those Russians down in southern Russia and Ukraine were a small ethnic group among other ethnic groups.  To the north, from the Moscow-Petersburg latitude up to the Arctic were hunting and reindeer herding people, still mostly neolithic but with some traded metal and other southern technical products.  The further south they found themselves the more agriculture they did.  Some were Balts of various flavors, proto-Estonians, etc., others Finno-Ugric peoples, their languages related to Turkish: Mordvinians, Muromanians. Maris, Karelians, Komi, Udmurts, Mari, Khanty, Mansi.
 On the western coast the Balts were interacting fairly extensively with the wandering Scandinavians, who would pick up amber, furs, slaves, etc. for trade south, leaving some coins, spices, etc.  Scandinavians of course had earlier followed the rivers down all the way to the Black Sea, settling and intermarrying all along the way, contributing to the modern Russian ethnic group.
 Many more peoples in Siberia: Nenets, Enets, Nganasan, Selkups, Permyaks, more.  The same latitudinally determined lifestyles pertained: hunting in the north (without reindeer herding), more agriculture further south, and trade.
 In the far east still more ethnic groups: Yenets, Ostiaks, Kottes, Samyeds, Chukchi, Tungus, more.  In their southern zone, Manchuria and Korea, they interacted with Chinese culture, in their north they had that arctic culture of hunting that we used to call "eskimo" before that term came to be deemed pejorative.
 In the 12th century, the whole of the northernmost zone was not only coinless but almost entirely without metal.  In the Moscow latitudes there was metal but no coins, except for a few that got left along the fur and amber trade routes.  To find coin striking cultures you'd have to go south all the way to Ukraine, and further east to Tajikistan, etc. north of Afghanistan.  In the far east the nomad Liao kingdom  made Chinese style coins in Manchuria from the 8th century, but there was no circulation to speak of to their north.
 Now we need to discuss the Turks.  We have already met with a Turkic people in this discussion of Russia.  That was the Khazars, quite advanced in their technology and political culture, who kept Islam at bay in Ukraine and nurtured the development of Kievan Rus, the polity that eventually supplanted them.  Actually, from at least the 5th century CE on Turks of various kinds were the dominant factor in central Asian affairs from western China to Ukraine.  They were everywhere.  Some were nomads, some farmers, but in the time frame corresponding to the European dark ages and early medieval period they were on the move, migrating southward and east or west (mostly) in response to pressure from other peoples, themselves on the move, perhaps because of climate change.  By the 12th century they were showing up in the settled zone as Muslims, but they were still Turks.  They were really good with horses, and they liked to fight.
 Nomad or not, Turks tended to form strongman political organizations they called khanates.  There were elements of popular selection in the choice of khan, but there was a strong tendency of khans to want to perpetuate a family dynasty.
 Turks appeared in the “west” in the 11th century in the polity of the Seljuks.  These people had been hanging out on the steppe from the Volga to Kazakhstan before descending into Iran, becoming Muslim.  They really liked what they found in Iran, culturally speaking, and politically used the governing structures there to expand westward into Anatolia, Syria, Palestine.
 In Palestine the Seljuks encountered the European pilgrim movement.  Christians had been coming to the Holy Land for centuries, some degree of extraterritoriality had developed by agreement with the local governments.  It looked messy and dangerous to the Seljuks, and there was also, obviously, money to be made.  The Seljuks took steps to tighten up the tourist operations there, imposing transit fees and taxes, taking over security, making certain activities illegal, certain zones off limits.  The European response was a crusade, one of many.
 The crusades really riled up the Seljuks and they retaliated both militarily and economically, not just against western Catholics but against Christians in general.  Trade fell off all over the middle east.  Included in the depression was the silk road business and the north-south fur and amber economy, in which was heavily involved that Slavic polity, Kievan Rus.
 The rulers of Kievan Rus had been developing governing problems due to the tendency of local governors to ignore the interests of the center.  The Seljuk squeeze on the middle east trade and the subsequent wars left Kievan Rus high and dry.  Bad government and no money, it lost its coherence and was essentially a bunch of independent towns by the 13th century.
 Yet another problem for Kiev was the arrival of the Kipchak (Cuman) Turks who set up a khanate just a day’s ride away.  The Kipchaks proceeded to raid westward, safety minded people tended to leave Kiev for safer places to do their business, amongst which Vladimir, Suzdal, Rostov, Chernigov, Novgorod.  Those towns grew as Kiev shrank.
 A primary figure of the period was Vladimir Monomakh, ruled Kiev from Chernigov, fought many battles with the Kipchaks.  His second wife was a Kipchak princess who birthed several children, one of whom became Yuri Dolgoruki, founder (more or less) of Moscow, Pereyeslavl, Kostroma, and other towns in central Russia
 Yuri was involved in fairly constant warfare with rulers of the various cities in his region, part of the essentially anarchic rhythm of the times.  He was a bridge to the future.  The cities he founded and others he fought over were the ones that grew and eventually prospered in centuries to come.
 Let’s talk about the coins.  The srebreniki of the late 10-11th centuries were struck mostly in Kiev, a few in Novgorod.  They were all special purpose coins, coronation commemoratives, etc.  The money on the street, revealed from hoards, was almost entirely imported silver and billon pennies/deniers from western Europe, mostly Germany.  That was where the trade was going then.  The Arab dirhams of the previous century were all gone, the flow shut off by the Seljuk wars.
 You know, now that I think of it, there is no single reference for Russian coins from Kievan Rus to the present.  For the srebreniki the book is Millennium of Russian Coins by Sotnikova & Spassky, in Russian and out of print.  For everything from then until Ivan the Terrible all there is is Russian Monetary System by I. G. Spassky, Russian and English verions, also out of print.  Its a survey and historical discussion, inadequate and low quality pictures.
 There was a major change in the German coinage in the 13th century, with debasement in some places and development of bracteates elsewhere.  Neither of these new products were exported to Russia to any extent, and coinage tended to disappear, replaced on the streets of Novgorod and Kiev with, wrote Spassky, squirrel and marten heads, cuna, they were called.  He mentions some cowries, beads, but not enough to make plausible their use as coin substitutes.
 In the shops the wholesale business was carried on with ingots of silver (rarely gold) in standardized shapes and weights, called grivna.
 We don’t have any small animal skulls in the old Russian coin market, but there have been more than a few of the silver ingots pass through the auctions of the last two decades.  Couldn’t find any for sale precisely now.  The ones from Kiev are elongated hexagons, from Novgorod they are kind of like flattened cigars, some curved like a canoe, often with lines and/or names scratched on them.  Prices used to be a thousand dollars or two.  Probably considerably higher now.  And I think I remember reading about modern fakes in the Journal of the Russian Numismatic Society.
 Spassky pointed out that very few if any of the ingots have been found in any way hacked to make small change.  This tends toward the thought that they were not circulating objects, rather mostly or entirely for hoarding and large transactions.
 Spassky wrote several pages on the “coinless period,” which lasted about 200 years both before and during the Mongol interlude.  He found it hard to accept that when the old records wrote of “heads of squirrels and martens” that the little skulls were actually being used as small change.  He mentioned as well references to “leather money” but went on to write that no trace of such objects have ever been found.  A mystery absolutely unsolved to this day.

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RUSSIA - part 4

 I'd like to start this month with a discussion of the word "tamgha."  The "gh" sound is supposed to be a gargle but you can go ahead and use a hard "g," no one will mind.  Tamgha originally referred to tribal and family brands that Turks used on their livestock.  Later on they used them on coins, so did the Mongols, so did the early Russians.  They are much simpler than European heraldry.  If there's a tamgha on the coin you can usually nail the attribution in a second instead of trying to read the (usually) Arabic.
 And I'd also like to discuss the mint right in the Islamic context.  Why?  Because the Mongols brought the Islamic minting and fiscal style to Russia, and the coins of the Russian princes grew out of the Mongol usages.
 Production of coinage was considered the prerogative of the ruler in the World of Islam (their term for it, to be distinguished from the rest of the world).  A guy puts a coin out (especially a gold coin) he is beating his chest.  He is shouting to the world I AM IT.  Someone puts his name on a coin who can't defend himself like to get his head cut off by the real boss.  So if you see an old Islamic coin there was a guy's name on it and he was armed.  The first thing a rebel or usurper or conqueror would do was strike coins.  There were cities in places like Afghanistan that present the spectacle of 3 coin issuers in a year, or was there one that had 5?
 It was different in Europe, where there was a patchwork of allegiances and authorities: cities, churches, knightly orders, and rulers of various status of course.  In Islam everything theoretically referred back to an overlord.  That would be the caliph in most circumstances.  Except in the Mongol realm.  They killed the caliph when they caught him and though the line was continued in hot house conditions, as it were, until the Ottomans took on the burden those caliphs during the Mongol time were rather ghostlike in their temporal influence.
 I'm going to tie all this together.
 Up in Mongolia, late 10th century, there was evidently some kind of government comprised of a federation of tribes or clans as they're usually called in the Mongol context.  Each clan had a strongman leader called Khan.  There was an overlord called Kakhan.  They were organized enough to have a capital city, bits of Chinese style bureaucracy, and, apparently, they issued coins.  They are Chinese style, big, iron, with as yet untranslated legends.
 For unclear reasons the organization of the Mongol kakhanate deteriorated in the 11th and 12th centuries so that by the time Chingis Khan came along it was complete steal from your neighbor anarchy.  I will not tell the Chingis story here, rather will confine myself to two observations and an aside.   He was a man of vision and ability who saw a better way of doing things and set about realizing his dream using the political tools at hand.  I think its fair to say that he was the most successful of the great conquerors.
 His basic political tool was absolute personal loyalty disseminated and perpetuated through a feudal system.  This is important for treatment of the subject peoples, who were considered to some extent the property of the Mongol feudal retainers, themselves in some ways "owned" by their personal overlord all the way to the top.
 And, by the way, the gene line of Chingis is said to be present in over 20 million people, the largest bunch of descendents of any single person ever.  So say the scientists.
 The impetus for a lot of the Mongol marauding was actually response to local situations.  They were resisted most places they went, and situations arose in which they had to change plans, bring in more troops to quell uprisings, punish treachery, secure borders, defeat the undefeated.  Then, after a while, they got so big they just wanted to see how far they could go so they tried Japan, Java, Burma, Egypt.  But there were limits, they found them.  After they stopped expanding, about 100 years after Chingis died, normal dynastic dynamics and imperial/provincial politics tore them apart, but slowly.  There were still Mongol governments here and there in the 18th century, not to mention the Moghuls of India who traced their lineage therefrom.
 Chingis was actually dead before the Mongols conquered Russia.  His generals were all relatives and friends.  Subotai, friend, found himself in Azerbaijan during a campaign against the Kipchak Turks.  Recall that "founder of Moscow" Yuri Dolgoruki had a Kipchak mother.  Having punished the Kipchaks to his satisfaction he got western wanderlust and asked Chingis if he might do a bit of marauding.  Not waiting for a reply, which in due course arrived in the affirmative, he proceeded into Ukraine, where he smashed, among other armies, those of the Russian princes.  The famous battle was at the Kalka river, 1223. Continuing west and south, he engaged the Volga Bulgars, lost that one, and then he turned around and went home, to proceed into China, mucking around there for more than a dozen years.  Chingis died in 1230, son Ogedei succeeded, continuing to pursue the dream of a united Eurasia.
 In the west the unvanquished Kipchaks and Bulgars continued to give trouble to the Mongols.  In 1236 Ogedei decided to take care of them.  A large army was sent, Batu, a grandson of Chingis, as leader, Subotai commander.  They were entirely successful, destroying the remnants of Kievan Rus, wrecking all of the major Russian cities except Novgorod and Pskov, which submitted in the proper manner.  Hungary was taken.  Poland was taken.  The Mongols were marching on Vienna when they were called home to a great council: Ogedei had died.  They had hoped to drive to the Atlantic, but they never got back.
 Poland and Hungary licked their wounds and began to recover.  Mongol control of Russia and Ukraine remained tight for about 200 years.  Batu brought a large bunch of his kinsmen to settle in the region.
 Just a brief bit of Mongol sociology.  Chingis had organized the entire Mongol polity as a military organization.  Nonsoldiers were there to support the soldiers.  The troops were organized along family lines, called "ordu," which means "camp."  We use the word "horde."  "Horde" carries the connotation of innumerability, but the Mongol commanders knew precisely how many people they were directing and who they were, one of their strengths against enemies in love with personal valor at the expense of common sense.  In the field the ordu units identified each other by colored banners.
 Batu's ordu color was blue, so the "Blue Horde" was the occupying authority in the west.  He was not well liked by the mainstream Mongols back home.  Here is the flaw that destroyed the Mongol empire after a while - a family was in control, they favored their own, some of their own were incompetent or ornery, damage was done, compounded, eventually the center did not hold.
 The Mongols like to keep the local norms going if it didn't interfere with their ends.  In Russia-Ukraine at that time the high culture and governing norms were primarily Islamic, specifically Turkish in ethnicity and bureaucratically Persian.  So when they finally got to putting out coins a few decades after they got there the language they used was Arabic, the coins resembled contemporary coinage of the neighbors.  The coppers were called "fals," silvers were "dirham," golds were "dinar."
 The Mongols encouraged hard work, taxed it heavily, demanded absolute obedience, if you behaved you would be allowed to survive and propagate.  There was an ethnic hierarchy, normal venality and corruption, went on and on for hundreds of years.  That's how the Russians see it.  They call it the "Mongol yoke," two centuries of deep suffering for them.
 The Mongols, on the other hand, were just doing what they were doing, which started as a visionary army, a religion of world domination if you will, and ended with the normal family feuds and structural deterioration.
 Batu's descendents governed his territory for about 125 years, about 5 khans in they started making coins.  The module was about 15mm or so for all of the coins, the silver dirham essentially that of the Zangids of Iraq, etc. whom they had conquered.
 Coins were struck at a city taken from the Bulgars near the confluence of the Volga and Kama Rivers.  The town's name was variously Bulghar, Serai, Gulistan, or Ordu.  The earliest named coins are from Mangu Timur Khan, 1267-80.  35 years later they were Muslim.  Jani Beg Khan, 1341-57, built a new capital further up the Volga.  Apparently the exact sites of neither of these towns are known today.  Jani Beg's city was called New Serai (Serai Al-Jadid), New Gulistan, etc.  His coins are pretty much the most common of the series.
 After Jani Beg the various branches of the family engaged in separatism and civil war for about 35 years, during which time 18 people claimed to be the khan, most of them issuing rare coins.  In 1378 Toqtamish Khan of the White Horde branch of the family occupied the anarchized Blue Horde zone, creating a united government called the Golden Horde, that endured until 1391.  In that year Toqtamish got in a fracas with Tamerlane, another descendent of the Mongols.  Tamerlane won but did not destroy the Golden Horde state.  The Goldens lost again in 1395, Toqtamish died, anarchy again prevailed.  The last Golden Khan died in 1502, parts of his country gradually replaced during the course of the 15th century by the Gerei khans of Crimea and the resurgent Russian princes.
 In the northern regions, north of Moscow, east of Finland, there was still not much in the way of history as we think of it.  Culture was largely local and family based, economy was direct and unmediated by such governmental structures as might want to issue coins.  Coins from the south were known of course, but were not in common use.  Even the occasional local imitation that is found cannot be taken as showing coin usage up there at that time.
 Way over in the east the pattern of previous centuries prevailed.  The Mongols issued coins in China and Manchuria, but they did not circulate much in what is now the Russian Far East.

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RUSSIA - part 6

 I must respond to the letter from Robert Krill.  He asks if the symbol on the 10th century Kiev coins is now the Ukrainian national emblem should they not be considered the first Ukrainian coins?  I have no problem with that point of view.  He claimed that the contention that they are first "Russian" coins as inaccurate and propagandistic.  Propagandistic is also OK with me, people do like to propagandise, but inaccurate?  Kind of fuzzy.  Back then, I submit, there were no "Russians" and "Ukrainians."  All the same people, divided and united by ephemeral and local politics and military necessity, not the mutually disdainful separate ethnic groups of today.  Russians consider those coins to be their first, Kievan Rus to be their first political state.  Ukrainians do too.  When I get to Ukraine I will describe those coins again.  Perhaps someone will yell at me then as well.
 Like the "Holy Land."  They will have to learn to share their history.  The past belongs to everyone who lives today.  The ancestors, I submit, do not care.  They would look at their descendents, some become Russians, others Ukrainians, and shrug their shoulders.  Eh, they tried.  Kids think the strangest things.  What can you do?
 I had expected some pushback on various assertions I might make regarding Russian history.  Some people have very significant emotional investments.  Aside from Mr. Krill there has only been one other.  Anonymous, historically incorrect, raving, obscene, slightly threatening, sent from a bogus address in Ohio.  Got two letters from that guy.  Hey, if you send me another I'll turn them over to the FBI.  And I guess if you liked getting upset about what I've written so far you'll just love it when I discuss the development of serfdom.  But whatever you do keep your subscription to WCN.
 Oh, and I might mention, purely as an aside, that no Mongols have ever complained about my treatment of their history.
 This time I'm going to discuss "wire money."  What's the main thing about wire money?  Smallness.  Accordingly, I'll start with a general discussion of the manufacture and use of tiny coins in Eurasia from about 600 BC to about 1400, when the Russian wire money began to be made.
 The ratios between gold, silver and copper have until the last few decades varied within a certain range of, oh, say, 1 gold to 8-14 silvers..  (Now, just to show how weird it is today, it's about 1:75.)  Copper coinage was always based on the "who cares" principle.  Base metal coinage was usually a purely local matter, exceptions include the early coinage of Sicily and in China, where they were doing things a bit differently.
 Most places there was this prejudice against base metal by both merchants (too heavy) and rulers (sheer hoitytoitiness) and the urge to be using something of "real value" in one's small transactions tended to the production, early on, of teeny weeny silver and occasionally gold coins.  They did that in Greece from at least the 5th century BCE, and in India, probably an independent development, possibly as early as the 3rd century BCE.
 After a few hundred years the sheer inconvenience of tiny coins started getting to people.  They got lost, they were expensive to make, it began to make sense to use that yucky token copper.  Teensy coins died out in the Greek world.  But they continued, more or less without a break, in parts of India, specifically the west, Saurashtra (think Mumbai) to Karachi perhaps.  Many regional governments over several centuries put out tiny silver coins.  Why?  Because they worked, the people who used them liked them.
 This is all way before the popularity of tiny coins in southern India.  The last of the western Indian tiny silvers were issued by Muslim invaders in the 12th century.
 Then came the Mongols.  They, of course, messed up everything over a very large area.  In southeastern Pakistan, for example, it seems they largely depopulated a region comprising a lot of the modern provinces of Sind and Baluchistan.  When people came back about 100 years later they brought their central Indian coins with them, the clunky "dump" stuff, not eensies.
 Meanwhile, over west, late 12th century, inflation, the Crusades, disruption of trade, exhaustion of silver mines, and other factors had caused the authorities to cut the weight of the silver coins over and over again until just before the Mongols came to Iraq and Syria the dirham, which had started out essentially as a quarter, was about the size of a dime and getting smaller.  The Mongols, including the Golden Horde in Russia/Ukraine, kept issuing that small module dirham, the coins getting cruder and a little smaller through time.  When?  14th century.
 As the Mongol governments declined the locals reasserted their interests.  it happened in Russia and it happened in Anatolia and eventually it happened in Mesopotamia, etc.  Anatolia is important for a discussion of tiny coins because as the locals (Turks at that time) took over that's what they made.
 In the world of Islam, when a dirham got too small they started feeling strange calling it that, another name should be found.  Small enough they called them "qirat," originally 1/6 of a dirham.  The Turks called them akje.  In the aftermath of the Mongols akjes is what they struck.  Akjes became a major presence in the general circulation of the Black Sea region, which included Ukraine/Russia.  They were conveniently mimicked by the Golden Horde - weighed more or less the same at first.  And then, later, mid-15th century, when the Russian princes started making their wire coins, and the Ottoman akjes were about 0.5g, what do you suppose was the average weight of those Russian coins?
 Spassky, without clarifying anything, I think, rejected the thought that the coins of the Russian princes had anything to do with those of the Golden Horde, but elsewhere mentioned that there was a wide range of weights to the dengi (we're talking multiple tenths of a gram here!)  Pure murk.
 OK, somebody argue with me.  Tell me the Russian wire coins were a purely de novo local development, nothing to do with the Turks.
 So let's talk about those local Russian coins.
 The Mongol governing style was to let the locals do what they wanted as long as they did exactly as they were told whenever the Mongols told them to do or not do something.  To be fair though, that was how almost all rulers behaved back then, just the Mongols were relatively more efficient about it.  And the Mongols did not start out being possessive of the mint right, but when they became Muslim (in the west) and Chinesoid (in the east) they became quite control freaky about their coinage.  So when the Russian cities started putting out coins it was like a pie in the face to the Golden Horde.  It was telling them "We're going to do what we want and you can't stop us."
 At least in part.  Actually, the city of Novgorod was at least sort of independent throughout the Mongol period.  It had not been conquered, but rather had come to terms, and maintained a favored status, gateway to trade with the west.  Spassky described a major silver import business from the 12th to the 14th centuries, largely of Bohemian pragergroschens, most of which were melted down and made into ingots.
 By the way, the ingots were originally called "grivna," but in the late 12th century the term "rouble" started to come into use.  The ingots were mostly for hoarding, and major transactions, occasionally they were cut in half in the course of transactions, none (?) are known cut smaller than that.  Toward the end of their run a practice developed of putting a validation stamp on or near the cut edge.
 I will make a perhaps controversial proposal now, so get ready.  It seems to me, looking at it from the outside, that perhaps the relationship between the Russians and the Mongols was a bit better than entirely one of miserable repression.  Nevsky, after all, sought and received aid from his Mongol overlords in his struggle against the Teutonic knights.  The Mongols saw the Russians doing business with the west, liked it, taxed it, let them do, within limits, their thing.  When their thing became coinage. well. maybe they were too weak to do anything about it anyway.
 The first of the Russian dengi, according to Spassky, were made in Moscow for Dmitri Ivanovich Donskoi, 1359-89, who won independence from the overlords, whom we will, following Russian usage, henceforth refer to as Tatars rather than Mongols.  There is an historical joke in that phraseology.  Want me to tell it?  OK, I will.
 The original Tatars were an independent tribe who allied with Chingis Khan and then turned against him.  Chingis defeated them and proceeded to kill all of their males above a certain age.  What was left of the Tatars was reconstituted as a military slave people, sent to do military dirty work like local policing/repression.  Westerners took to the appellation because it reminded them of Tartarus, the Hell of the ancient Greeks, from which the fiendish Tatars could be imagined to have come.  Ha ha.
 Anyway, Dmitry Donskoi's dengi have western style figural types on one side while the other have Arabic legends and look extremely Golden Hordish.  They are rare and very expensive these days.  I've never had one.
 Dmitry's son Vasily, 1389-1425, issued relatively prolifically with numerous types.  Late in the reign he reduced the weight of the coinage by about 50%.  I got a few while the Russians were exporting their coins in the late 90s, so according to my personal definition (if I have it...) they are not rare.  I paid about $100 for them, probably worth at least $300 today.
 During Vasily's reign mint right began to be licensed to subordinates.  According to Spassky, those guys would say, essentially, "We need some coins over here.  Commerce, you know."  And Vasily would say, "OK, buy a license and give me a cut."  Towns were Galich, Serpukhov, Uglich, Mozhaisk.  Spassky described the issues as "extremely varied."  To me that points to the probability of frequent recoinages as a means of taxation.  You had to bring the old coins in and pay to get new ones, a very common practice in Europe at the time.
 Varied they may be, but also rare, all of them.
 Vasily's son, Vasily II, 1423-62 with interruptions, continued in a similar vein, but a counter trend emerged as he annexed territory in various ways.  Where this happened the local independent coinage disappeared, replaced by Vasily coinage issued by what had become one of his branch mints.
 The reign of Vasily II was twice interrupted by insurgencies conducted by princes of Galich.  While briefly resident in Moscow the Galiches made coins, wrote Spassky, using Vasily's dies in combination with their own, producing thus coins with two names on them.  One more numismatic curiosity.
 The next prince of Moscow was Ivan III, who laid the foundation for the Russian empire to come and during whose reign the independence of the remaining great cities, and therefore their coinage, came to an end.  We'll come back to him next time.  For now let us discuss those principalities.
 The towns in question were Novgorod, Yaroslavl, Ryazan (subcoinage for Pereyeslavl), Tver (subcoinage for Kashin), Pskov, and Rostov.  Distinguish these, and their coins, from abovementioned Serpukhov, etc.  The coinage of the latter began as Moscow dependencies and ended as they became political suburbs.  The former were independent, though, in the larger scheme of things, not for long.
 It used to be, for about a year in 1993 or so, that you could get wholesale wire money and sometimes find a few of these mixed in with the Ivan the terribles and Mikhail Romanovs.  That stopped pretty quick and all the good stuff got pulled out of the wholesale.  Now the good stuff mostly goes to auction.  And at this point the wholesale has pretty much disappeared, though who knows what the future might bring.
 Anyway, similarly to the Moscow dependencies coins, there were many varieties, all rare today.  They began often with Arabic or pseudo-Arabic legends on one side.  Rostov, in fact, started its series with a sort of Miroesque ram's head tamgha countermarked on Golden Horde coins.  And the coins ended smaller than they began, either more or less imitating Moscow coins or actually being Moscow coins after the Moscow takeover.
 Late in the city coins series copper coins appeared, called pul, just like the Golden Horde coppers (pul = fals by some linguistic evolution through Arabs, Turks, Mongols, and finally Russians).  The coppers typically did not have some ruler's name on them, this fact being taken as an indication that they were made by town councils or merchant guilds.  And keep in mind please that typically some smith would be allowed to buy a license to make coins, there were no full time "official mints," so to speak.
 Oh, let's talk about the "wire" part of "wire money."  Many ways to make planchets by hand.  Islamic silver at that time tended to be, far as I can tell, usually cast blanks.  European silver was cut or punched out of sheets (this was the groschen period, they hadn't gotten to shillings yet, let alone thalers).
 So the coins of, say, the Golden Horde were made by taking a proper weight blob of silver, beating it flat, then striking it with the dies.  And that's how the Russian coinage began as well.  The early planchets of all of these princely city coins were, I think, made one at a time.
 But at some point someone figured out that you could save time by cutting the blanks out of pieces of wire and it was off to the races.
 I'm wondering though.  In Spassky, page 96, figure 70, there is a conceptual "reconstruction" of the manufacture of wire planchets that shows the wire bits hammered out "to shape" and ready for the dies.  I'm thinking that I'd rather take the hot wire and the assistant runs it through the dies one coin after another, THEN cut them apart.  Makes more sense to me than picking up a tiny planchet and placing it just so on the lower die.  Am I nuts?
 You know what's the strangest thing about this pre-Tsar series?  No catalog.  Not even a trial listing.  Spassky, out of print catalogs of auctions and old collections.  It is actually kind of ridiculous.  Not a major world coinage like, say, the Kushans (for whom there is also no catalog), but of major interest to many collectors, even though the coins are all rare.  Not much useful on the web either.  What do you say, Russian Ministry of Culture?

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RUSSIA - part 7

 Clarifications and opinions came in about last month's article from Gerry Anaszewicz.  Gerry is in some ways a key element in the current Russian numismatics scene, so whatever he says is to be considered more accurate than anything I might say in that field.  There is a book on copper puls: "Russian Copper Coins of 14th to 16th Centuries", by Peter Gaidukov, excellent he says, and another, self-explanatory: "Russian Half Dengas, Quarter Dengas and Polushkas" by Peter Gaidukov.  But indeed, there is no catalog of the pre-Tsarist wire money as a whole.
 We pick up the thread of Russian history and coins with Ivan III of Moscow, 1462-1505.  So this is the time to discus serfdom.
 If you google "serfdom" you get interesting results.  The essential fact is the hereditary binding of a person to the job that person's parents did in the service of a "lord."  This is distinguished from flat out slavery, which is going and catching people and making them do what you want them to do forever.  The lord of the serfs was not considered their "owner," rather he was their "protector."  The articles state that this it got worse, that serfs became more chattel-like over time, but that is later.
 It more or less began in the late Roman empire, where two centuries of hard times made for a lot of heavy obligations for everyone.  The public had to support the army, without which the barbarians would rape and pillage.  The situation was obvious to everyone.  For everyone everywhere life was either military or military support.  The system was formalized by the emperor Diocletian, who decreed hereditary obligatory professions.  The obligation fell most heavily on the agriculturalists (peasants) as usual.  The normal form of the obligation was some number of days spent working the lord's fields in addition to one's own.  The lord provided in return protection.
 This idea of obligatory unpaid service straggled on through the "dark ages," competing with chattel slavery on the fringes near the Islamic world, until it became the norm in western Europe in the middle ages.  Interestingly, free peasants were the norm at that time in eastern Europe and Russia.  The Mongols sort of froze political development in their zone, in a sort of dialectical sense, and somewhat kept down the self-aggrandizing nobles who would have perhaps liked to emulate their western peers in their usurpations of properties and persons.
 But, claims Wikipedia, by the time of late Kievan Rus there was some serfdom happening.  With nomad invasions going on all the time the need of farmers for protection was as obvious as that the soldiers needed food and supplies.  Necessity was the prime mover in the lives of everyone.  And in the way of humans everywhere, there was a tendency of people who could to take advantage of the situation for personal benefit.
 Serfdom began to break down in western Europe in the aftermath of the Black Death of the 14th century, when there were fewer people and they became worth more.  But as it was fading in the west (took several centuries) it was growing in the east.  There was a gradual tightening of the laws of bondage, until in 17th century Russia flight was made a crime and the lord gained the right to sell the serf off the land, at which point the distinction between serfdom and slavery essentially vanished.
 The chronic unfairness of the arrangement sparked frequent rebellions and a constant stream of desertions.  In Russia/Ukraine the deserters usually took off south or east, settling where both convenient and possible, and formed outlaw communities.  A lot of those communities became the subculture later called Cossack.
 People talk about national character, a very touchy subject at all times.  Could something be said about the effect on the "Russian soul" of so many centuries of being forced to do things, so many centuries of shirking obligation?
 Meanwhile, in the high political world, Ivan III of Moscow inherited an organization that had become the most powerful of the Russian princely entities.  Through purchase, marriage, sly tricks, occasional violence Ivan acquired the territories of almost all of the other princes and the republics of Novgorod and Pskov.  He stopped paying tribute to the Tatars, reduced their town Kazan to a dependency, though that had to be done again later.
 Some possible claim to an early exercise in modern propaganda in that place and time.  Some important dates: 1453 Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman Turks.  1468 the Moscow church became independent and coequal with Constantinople.  1469 the pope arranged a match between the recently widowed Ivan and Sophia Paleologos, niece of the last Byzantine emperor.  The pope imagined a reunification of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, but instead Ivan and his new wife went strongly for the idea that Moscow was the "Third Rome" and the Orthodox creed the one and true.
 Sophia brought a bunch of imperial rigamarole with her: how things were done in the "Second Rome" back in the good old days, the double headed eagle, transcendant haughtiness.  It was all good to Ivan, that was how he had been thinking anyway.  At the time consolidation was going on all over Europe, monarchs were becoming more powerful, nobles less.  Ivan was pleased as punch to have someone who knew the forms from the inside.  By the end of his reign the nobles were in a box of protocol that they would have to fight their way out of.  Of course they tried, but that's for later.
 To the east, the Mongols/Tatar governments were fairly well disintegrated at the start of his reign and almost disappeared by the end.
 To round out the picture of Ivan's world, at that time, all of those 4 decades of the late 15th century, Lithuania had about 6 times the territory of Muscovy and the political power to go with it, being united with Poland as it was, at least until 1492.  Lithuania-Poland was IT in eastern Europe, and what country did the Lithu-Poles worry about and wrangle with?  Sweden.  What went on in Russia was not particularly important to them.  They didn't see any "Third Rome."  They saw a bunch of wood hovels.  Not important.  Ivan fought both of them, Lithuania lost territory, Sweden was a draw.
 Let's talk about Ivan's coins.  Again, we are using Spassky, which is not a catalog.  I remember getting a few Ivan III coins back in the 90s and trying to match them with the pictures.  But the Spassky pictures are so small!  Same as the coins.  Usually crudely struck.  Fragmentary legends, some of which, wrote Spassky, are completely meaningless.  All very inconvenient.
 In keeping with the conventions of the time there were many types issued under the comforting blanket of Ivan III's reign.  Many mints too, from all the big cities.  Can we say anything about them as a whole?  Well, the basic denomination was the denga, later to become the half kopek but there were no kopeks at that time.  Occasionally issued were polushkas (half denga) and chetverts (quarters), the latter in the running (though not the winners) for world's smallest coins.
 Remember that photo of the horseman denga last month?  The one I asked you to attribute?  The one that was missing the picture of the other side, which was they only possibility for identifying it?  Through data mismanagement I missed the deadline for submitting the other side, sorry, so that was a wasted exercise.  I've had that coin since the 90s, but just last night, looking through Spassky one more time, there it finally was, appearing as if by magic.  Anonymous, Moscow, time of Ivan III or his son and successor, Vasily.
 This is the situation on the ground with these pre-Ivan the Terrible wire coins: you will, almost certainly, not come across one these days that has not already been looked at by someone knowledgeable, therefore it will come identified.  However, with some significant fraction of them you will be able to show your newly acquired and expensive coin to someone else and you will get a different opinion.  That will be because there is nothing definitive on the coin to nail it.  Bunch of letters, one of them is "V," one of them is "N," so Ivan?  Maybe, or maybe not.
 By the end of Ivan's reign pretty much all of the issue had the badge of Moscow, which was the horseman brandishing sword.  Usually he faces right but not always.  Usually there is a legend around him.  Local coinage was suppressed, leaving only Tver, Novgorod, Pskov, and of course Moscow.
 For completeness I must mention Ivan III's gold coin, a ducat imitating Hungarian types, called "ugorsky" (Hungarian).  One piece known.  It resides in the Hermitage museum, where it can be adored.
 Son and successor Vasily III, 1505-33, pretty much completed the consolidation of the Russian state pursued by his forebears.  The last holdouts, Ryazan, etc., already under the thumb of Moscow, were annexed.  Lithuania was fought with.  Forts were built in the south to defend against the various Tatars who were down there.  The forts were arranged as manors.  The lords took care of their needs and those of their soldiers by enserfing the local peasants.  His coins are, as Spassky wrote, "similar" to those of his father.  That must be taken to mean that there were relatively many different types, that the horseman type predominated, some may have been anonymous, some are attributable to mints, others not.
 And there is no good catalog.  What are people waiting for?  Nail everything down in private before publishing the famous definitive catalog?  Look, the modern way is to publish everything.  Put pictures of every possible coin on the web: unknown wire coin #1, #2, #493.  Consensus will emerge on some.  There will be progress.  RNS, can you set this up?  Maybe we can work together.

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RUSSIA - part 8

 So.  Why is Russia's Ivan III called "the Great" and why is Ivan IV called "the Terrible"?
 And what was going on in the rest of what is now Russia in the 16th century that might conceivably be of interest to coin people?
 And what does England have to do with it?
 By the time of his death in 1505 Ivan III had tripled the size of his holdings and declared himself "ruler of all the Russias,"  He almost finished the consolidation of Russia and ended the ability of local nobles to pass their lands to their heirs.  He did not end the nobles themselves however, in fact he had no choice but to continue to rely on some of them as border guards, particularly in the south where the Tatars still had some strength.  The nobles fretted and schemed.
 In most of his undertakings Ivan III was more or less successful.  He accomplished what he did without noteworthy excesses of violence, left things quite different than they had been, to the people who wrote the histories the end looked better than the beginning, therefore "the Great."
 Son and successor Vasily III more or less completed the consolidation project.  There were wars with Lithuania and Poland and the Crimean Tatars, successful for the most part.  There were pesky nobles, mostly defeated or outmaneuvered politically, though as a group their holdings of land actually increased, as did the rate and depth of enserfment.
 There was an issue with succession, however.  Vasily's first wife of two decades, Solomonia,  had produced no children.  Anguish.  Amidst considerable controversy Vasily divorced her and stuck her in a convent, married Yelena Glinskaya, a Catholic, as it happened.  She, after a couple of years of nail biting, brought forth a son, Ivan, and then another, Yuri.  Kind of late in the game for Vasily, who died when Ivan was three years old.
 There was an additional complication, possibly apocryphal, but consequential nonetheless.  A rumor began that the first wife, Solomonia, had birthed a boy a few months into her incarceration in the convent.  The kid was supposedly smuggled out and placed with a Cossack family, where he grew to be a fearsome and respected leader named Kudayar.  History records several fearsome and respected leaders of that name.  We will return to the Cossacks several times in this narrative and will note the interesting connections of those semi-outlaw communities with the crown.
 Vasily's death was caused by an abcess that developed into blood poisoning.  He explicitly and in the presence of witnesses named toddler Ivan IV as heir, Yelena as regent.  Nobles immediately started to intrigue and attempt to usurp power.  Yelena turned out to be rather competent for most of her 4 years in power, keeping nobles in check, somewhat, for a while, making a temporary peace with Lithuania, keeping Sweden at bay.  The normal instabilities of regency governments everywhere probably got her in the end.  There is a strong possibility that she was poisoned by agents of the Shuisky family, dying in 1538.  The grand prince, Ivan, was 8 years old.
 Oh, and there was a currency reform in 1534.  All of the remaining local designs were suppressed, all of the mints closed except for Novgorod, Pskov, Tver, and of course Moscow.  The types of the denga were standardized to the horseman with sword, though polushkas were somewhat varied: double or single headed eagle, etc.  Legends on the other side varied, some anonymous, some with Ivan's name.  And a double denga was created: the kopek, with a standard type of horseman with spear.
 In keeping with the norms of economic affairs everywhere and in every time, the new coins were a bit lighter than those they replaced.  To pay for the transition.  Ha ha.
 A second regency council took over headed by the Shuiskys.  They proceeded to govern for family advantage, neglecting both needs of state and the princely children.  6 years passed until Ivan was able to take over at age 14.
   The reformed coin series continued through the Shuisky regency.  Apparently there is no formal attribution of this or that type or legend to one or the other regency.  We could imagine, I suppose, that coins with "Ivan" might be Yelena's, those without perhaps the Shuisky's, but we don't actually know that.
 These reformed coins are at least slightly collectible, meaning that they can be both found and afforded.
 The stories of the regency period have Ivan and brother Yuri neglected, abused, used.  It is supposedly attested that Ivan tortured animals as a child.  Somewhere and somehow he attracted a faction.  He was, after all, the prince.  At age 14 a pro-Ivan coup of sorts occurred.  The story is that Andrei Shuisky was thrown to a pack of dogs.  Exactly how much impetus came from Ivan himself I don't know.  The web did not tell me in 3 minutes of research.  But in 1545 Ivan had power.  In 1547 he was crowned and took the title of Tsar.
 Actually grandfather Ivan III had used the title in correspondence, and there is at least one coin of the regency period that has the word, but 1547 is the year of the proclamation of Tsardom, which is to say of empire.  The announcement formally stated that Russia was the successor of Rome.  Theoretically it was a direct challenge to the claims of the Holy Roman Empire, but both parties had other fish to fry, namely the states between them: Poland, Lithuania, etc.  We may imagine the Hapburgs giving a little yawn.
 Ivan's reign was 51 years long, 31 of those years he was in power.  Those power years were traditionally divided into the "good years" and the "bad years."  The critical point was the death of his first wife in 1560.
 The good years began dramatically with the great Moscow fire.  Thousands died, tens of thousands rendered homeless.  Popular opinion, perhaps fed by some rival noble family focused on the family of Ivan's grandmother, the Glinskys, and herself.  Mobs killed some of them, and demanded the grandmother but Ivan stood them off.  So the Moscow masses got a off to a good start with the new Tsar.
 Ivan immediately began a reform of pretty much everything.  There was a new legal code that regulated everybody's behavior, from the nobles to the serfs.  A standing army was created to reduce the need for noble levies.  To go with the new state army the state acquired serfs.  A consultative assembly was created, the first ever in Russia.  In concept it had no real power, but in later years the assembly came to have a hand in affairs of state from time to time.
 Ivan wanted to do business with Germany, or rather, the Germans, but Poland and Lithuania leaned on the Hanseatic League to stiff the Russians, which they did, denying him a piece of the Baltic trade and setting the stage for numerous future wars in pursuit of a Russian Baltic coastline.  Ivan looked farther afield and ended up pursuing his western commerce with Elizabethan England.
 The 1550s were war against the Tatars to the east and southeast.  During that military phase Ivan suffered a life-threatening illness after which his personality was noticed to have changed, becoming darker, moodier, more suspicious.  It didn't help that he had, in the depths of his illness, asked the nobles to acknowledge his infant son as heir and they had collectively refused.  Then in 1560 his wife died, Ivan suspecting poison.  Recall that he had seen a similar situation before in the case of his mother.  Maybe she was.
 Anyway, Ivan developed into a wrathful person.  You got on the wrong side of him you often ended up dead after torture, and your family and serfs too, your land and things confiscated.  Kind of like the old Roman emperors Tiberius or Domitian.  Ivan built a political police organization, the oprichnina, from the guards of his personal domains, the first such in Russia, to go looking for more people to hate.
 He went on like that for about two decades, flailing at whoever was available, oppressing, alienating, destroying.  Important people defected to enemy countries.  Wars were engaged and lost.  There was bad luck too: plagues, etc.  He developed bipolar-like symptoms,
 One of the last important things he did was argue with his son about the clothes son's wife was wearing.  During the argument Ivan struck son with iron poker or similar.  Son died.  Oops.  That was the heir to the throne.  The other son was "feeble minded."
 They've dug up his bones and analyzed them.  Lots of mercury.  Maybe someone had been feeding it to him for a long time.  Maybe that explains the mental symptoms.  Maybe his surviving son was eating the same food.
 Russia was a real mess at the time of his death in 1584.  It stayed a mess for several decades after.  Time of troubles they call it.
 Well, let's talk about the coins, which reflect none of this tempestuous history.  From 1547 the coins are standard types.  Kopecks the horseman has a spear.  Dengas he has a sword.  Polushkas have a bird.  The legends always have the words "Tsar" and "Ivan, " even if they're off the flan.  Under the horse mintmarks or moneyer's initials began to appear, first at Pskov, later at the other mints.
 Now is the time to bring up the die producing system, which is what they use to try to date the tsarist wire money.  Master punches were prepared from which the dies were made.  They call the masters "matochniki," so I guess we should call them mistresses, shouldn't we.  The book I use is Russian Money from Ivan the Terrible to Peter the Great by A. S. Melnikova, whom I saw briefly at the Mezhnumismat table at an NYINC around 1990 maybe.  Her book was published in 1989, all in Russian, which I can read but barely understand (oh, I guess that's the verb, isn't it?)  Gerry Anaszcewicz says there are newer and better books.
 Anyway, the matochniks of the the two sides can be linked, statistically and stylistically analyzed, some can be correlated with written records of moneyer's tenure, etc.  A succession can be cobbled together.
 For Ivan's coins mostly the best that can be done is tentative assignment to a group of years.  For later tsars the die matching has been refined to the point of assigning specific years.  I don't know how seriously to take these year assignments.  My understanding is that today there has been some attempts at assessing rarity within the various series, but that hasn't reached the dealer at the show level, nor whatever low level I occupy.  When I get an Ivan the Terrible coin I look it up in Melnikova, put a number on it, and price it by grade.  Tver is worth more than the other mints.  Dengas and kopeks are valued about the same.  Polushkas are rare and usually are bad strikes or worn or both.
 As mentioned above, the bad situation of Ivan's later years got dramatically worse after his death.  Years of anarchy, more or less.  Ivan's history is not reflected in the coinage, but the various issues of the Time of Troubles sure do.

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RUSSIA - part 9

 Allow me to mention again that an overwhelming factor in Russia is the size of the territory.  It has always been hard to govern the far regions.  Still is.  They tend to do what they want to do out there.  And people, should they have a mind to, could up and leave for the wide open spaces, get lost.  Chances of getting caught have been pretty low.  Still are.
 The advance of the Russians and the Russian state eastward began as soon as the Mongol governments started to fall apart.  Dual motives operated: security of course, and trade, mostly in furs.
 By the end of the reign of Ivan III Russian state control theoretically ran to the Ural mountains.  Very light on the ground in the east of course, and the south heavily militarized against the powerful Crimean Tatars.  East of the Urals was a successor state to the Mongol Golden Horde: the khanate of Siberia.  No coins issued by the Khanate of Siberia that we know of.
 I must mention again that governments in what is now Russia all functioned the same in terms of their geography.  The autocratic and centralizing governments such as "Russia" and "Siberia" had their capitals in a "central" latitude, faced dangerous enemies on their southern borders, and faded off into neglect and ignorance to the frozen north.
 15-16th century Siberia had an eastern border on the Yenissey river east of Lake Baikal.  The far eastern regions at that time were pretty much neolithic forest people in the Russian latitudes.  They did fur trading down into China.  They did not make or use coins.
 I want to discuss the Cossacks in a bit more detail.
 Probably, maybe, many times more Russians moved out of the controlled zones on their own or as small groups than were "sent" by government, nobles, rich merchants.  Those personal initiative types left for a variety of reasons: financial, social, personal, etc.  They ranged from crazy criminals to sensitive souls, serfs on the lam to later children of nobles cut out of the inheritance.  After a few centuries of this it got so that wherever the migrants went they found people of their ethnic group, or they were nearby, already organized to some extent.  It got to be that there was a generalized way of life.  Essentially the settler communities were thoroughly militarized for defense.  Every male a horse soldier, every village an armed camp.  Camps grouped defensively into regional "hordes."  Just like the Mongols but add agriculture.  These groups, by no means all ethnically Russian, came to be known generically as "Cossack."
 When the Russian state started to expand the first people it bumped into were Cossacks.  The general approach of the newcomers was: oh, you're organized, you speak Russian, OK, we're from the tsar, you work for us now."  And they had them just keep doing what they were doing, which was to protect their territory, and pay a bit of taxes.
 They became really good at organized soldiering and they became at times favored instruments of the tsars.  Sometimes.  Other times they raised some very serious local rebellions.  Never definitively defeated.  Too useful to annihilate.
 Ivan the Terrible sent a Cossack expeditionary force to Siberia in 1580.  It overthrew the khan and Russia became twice as large as it had been.  Colonization by Russians began immediately.
 That brings us back to the numismatico-historical story of Russia proper.
 In 1581 Ivan the Terrible killed his older son in a fit of rage over his daughter-in-law's clothing, then died the following year.  His other son, Feodor, was probably mentally retarded but in any event did not govern, leaving the business to a council of nobles named by his father before his passing.
 The normal process of regency government ensued.  Members of the council immediately began to plot and scheme.  Violence was perpetrated.  After a few years one of them came out on top.  That was Feodor's brother-in-law, Boris Godunov.  Boris is generally seen as having governed well as regent.  He raised revenues by abolishing church exemptions, compensated them by securing a patriarchate designation for Moscow, kept rival nobles down, encouraged education, lots of good stuff.  He also juiced the colonization of Siberia and built a bunch of frontier towns on all sides.  Some of these have become big cities: Samara, Voronezh, Tobolsk.  He did formalize the status of the serfs, forbidding them from moving, and that's not nice to us moderns, but he also set a five year statute of limitations for the crime of flight.  I guess that would have been considered liberal and humane at the time.
 Feodor died in 1598.  No heir.  Let's talk about his coins.  They are all wire kopecks.  Mints are Moscow, Novgorod, and Pskov.  Moscow is far more common than the others.  Feodor's kopecks are not hard to find but are harder than those of his father.
 An assembly was convened and duly elected as tsar Boris Godunov, who had all the power anyway and who seemed to be doing a reasonably good job.
 Oh, and there was that matter of Dmitry Ivanovich.  Everything so complicated!  Ivan the Terrible had one last child by his last wife.  That was Dmitry, a toddler when Ivan died.  The church had not recognized that marriage, so Dmitry had no claim to the throne, but the regency council took no chances and packed baby and mother off to a distant town.  There Dmitry died, throat cut.  He did it himself during a seizure, read the official report.  Very mysterious.  People murmured and spread rumors for decades.  He didn't commit suicide, went the rumors, Boris ordered the hit.  It wasn't him who was killed, so it was said, but a patsy.  The real Dmitry was in hiding, so it was whispered late at night.  Maybe he was with the Cossacks, biding his time.
 Well, Boris Godunov began his reign with the same prudent competence he had shown as regent.  But he seemed to have been infected with paranoia like Tiberius of old, and he started abusing his power in furtherance of that disease.  He particularly tore into the Romanov family, about which more later.  He died in 1605, having substantially undermined his position.
 But wait, there was more.  Mini-ice age from 1601-03, freezing nights in mid-summer, crop failures, famine.  Government response was to distribute money and grain, but only in Moscow.  Hordes of starving people fled the countryside and overwhelmed the municipal government.  Revenues plunged, disorder, rebellion, anarchy.
 Coins of Boris are all silver kopecks.  Mints are Moscow, Novgorod, Pskov.  From 1600 the Novgorod coins are dated in Cyrillic letters after the ancient Greek manner, first dated coins of Russia.
 Boris coins are not rare.  Price according to grade and strike.
 Side note: the English Muscovy Company kopecks.  Boris continued Ivan the Terrible's policy of trying to do something with the English.  He chartered them a company to trade fur, amber, etc., allowed them to set up a station, allowed them to coin their own money.  They are assigned to 1598.  There is a differently shaped horseman and blundered Boris legends.  There is no chance that you will run into one by accident out here in non-Russia.  They cost about $1000.00.
 Amidst the chaos a guy appeared in Lithuania-Poland calling himself Dmitry Ivanovich and quickly developed a following.  In 1603 he entered Russia with a band of freebooters, mercenaries, privateers, and some under the table aid from Litho-Poland.  This guy has come to be known as the first false Dmitry.
 In 1605, after the death of Boris, Dmitry entered Moscow.  Boris had been succeeded by his 16 year old son, Feodor II.  The kid was OK but he never got his feet on the ground.  False Dmitry had the Moscow mob with him, Feodor was arrested, murdered in the palace a few months later.  False Dmitry took over as tsar.
 He didn't last long.  A plot was fomented by a prince, Vasily Shuisky, culminating in a massacre of Dmitry and his supporters.  That included a few thousand Poles, a fact duly noted in Litho-Poland from whence first false Dmitry had come.
 That takes us from 1605 to 1606.
 Vasily Shuisky convened an assembly, packed it with his people, made himself tsar.  He lasted from 1606 to 1610.  Nobody paid any attention to him.  Like the president of Somalia.  Maybe not even.  Warlords warred, schemers schemed, brigands pillaged.
 At a seemingly opportune moment a second false Dmitry appeared, again a creature of Litho-Poland, again made a bloody splash in Russia.  Vasily, in a very bad position, made a groveling treaty with Sweden.  The terms were the cession of some Russian territory and Sweden would send some troops against Litho-Poland.  So, three-country war taking place on Russian territory, 1609.
 Litho-Poland won that war and Vasily had to leave quickly.  1610.  Second false Dmitry got muscled out of the tsar job (completely figurehead at that moment) by the Polish commander, who put up the son of the king of Poland.  He attracted a Russian faction, and after giving his promise to preserve Orthodoxy he was allowed into Moscow.
 But when the news got back to Litho-Poland the king, Sigismund III, had other ideas.  He wanted to convert the Russians to Catholicism.  He deposed son Vladislav and took the tsarhood himself.  Who was advising him anyway?  But Sigismund never went to Moscow to pick up his crown.  So there was no one minding the store and armies milling around.  Sweden practically had to step in, didn't it?  To maintain order.
 Comically, in retrospect, and with due regard for the people who died in the six years of war that ensued, the Swedes initially put up their own third false Dmitry.  Fighting continued for several years, Swedes based in Novgorod, Litho-Poles in Moscow.    Some major pieces of misgovernment were perpetrated, particularly in the Litho-Polish zone: massacres of entire towns, a great fire in Moscow (1612), and so forth.
 The situation was eventually changed by a popular uprising.  A butcher of Nizhny Novgorod (not Veliki Novgorod, the ancient town we've been mentioning over and over again in this series, this is a completely different town) Kuzma Manin was his name, nobody in Russia doesn't love him, was chosen by his city to set up and run a civil defense corps, teamed up with a local prince, Dmitry Pozharsky.  The army they put together, they called it the People's Volunteer Corps, kicked the Litho-Poles out of Moscow.  The day of Polish surrender is a national holiday like Cinco de Mayo in Mexico.  1612.
 The next year a grand assembly convened and elected Mikhail Romanov tsar.  Why a 16 year old boy?  Long story.  Inadequate synopsis: very old family, schemed against Boris Godunov and suffered for it.  Michael's father had been advanced in church hierarchy by two of the false Dmitrys, second one made him patriarch.  Can't get more honorable than that.
 It is said that when they told Mikhail he went, like, "Ma, do I have to?"  It is said that the nobles were required to abase themselves and pledge utter fealty.  All very impressive but of course they went on as before corruptly working for family advantage, so Mikhaol Romanov had to tread carefully for quite a while.  But that was the end of the "Time of Troubles" as the historians see it.  Sweden still occupying Novgorod.
 Coins.  Several issuers during the Time of Troubles: Coins were issued by Feodor II, first false Dmitry, Vasily Shuisky, Polish Vladislav Sigismundovich, by the Swedes in Novgorod, and by the People's Volunteer Corps.
 For Feodor II Borisovich, the unfortunate youth, there are rare kopecks of Moscow and very rare of Novgorod.
 For first false Dmitry there are kopecks of Moscow, Novgorod, and Pskov.  Novgorod coins are dated.  Also rare.  And there is a series of gold and silver medals in the style of late 17th century German-Polish coins.  Rare of course.
 Vasily Shuisky made coins in Moscow and Novgorod.  Scarce, not rare.
 Vladislav Sigismundovich coins were made in Moscow and Pskov.  Scarce to rare.
 The Swedes in Novgorod struck coins from old Vasily dies from 1611-17.  You distinguish them from ordinary Vasily coins by die study and by their light weight (Vasily kopek 0.68g, Swedish 0.56g, later 0.48g).  After Mikhail Romanov was crowned the Swedes struck coins in his name in the Novgorod style with dates.  They also struck counterfeit Moscow coins.  The Swedish coins are rare.
 People's Volunteer Corps coins are in the name of Feodor Ivanovich, died 1598, last "legitimate" tsar as they put it.  Most of them have YaR below the horseman, for Yaroslavl, where they organized their army.  After they entered Moscow they struck coins there, and after Mikhail was elected they struck some in his name.  The coins of these people are some of the great souvenirs of high points of Russian history.  Very rare.  Highly esteemed.
 All of these coins look superficially the same.  You have to read them to attribute them.  Usually much of the legend is off flan, but they can be assigned or partially so based on die study.

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RUSSIA - part 10

 I started writing this survey of Russian numis-history just about the time the bubble burst.  Russian coins and notes had been on a roll, price-wise, for getting on 7 years.  The rise had been built by Russian prosperity; the top end by the numismatic vanity of Russian nouveaux riches, the lower end, where I live and work, dragged along by rising middle class prosperity and investor me-tooism.
 Now "they" all say the bubble has burst, Russian coins are in the dustbin of history.
 Not my experience.  The stupid prices for good stuff have evaporated, but I am still selling just about everything I get for ++ prices, and you know I don't specialize in quality.  Prices far in excess of SCWC (and paper, nothing to discuss, still hot).
 By the way, in general, SCWC prices OVERALL, taken as a whole, which were seriously obsolete, by and large, last year, are, in my opinion, now substantially closer to the real situation at the moment.  Don't you think?  Except for precious metals of course, which are set to the wrong spot.  Maybe they should change all of the precious metal prices to "spot + ...").
 We live in a world in which in most countries ordinary people are allowed to have opinions about things that matter: politics, religion, economics.  They ("we") may or may not be able to do anything about what we think, but we are free to think it, maybe, in some places talk about it.  Ordinary people have a say in politics in most places these days, if only in terms of a "public opinion" to which some attention must be paid by those whose hands are on the levers.
 Back then, 17th century, the big new idea was an extension of a very old idea: the infallible monarch whose word was law.  Everybody was supposed to do what they were told.  Period.  Unless of course they were very rich and/or connected.  And if you didn't like it you could run away, which was illegal, or you could rebel, which almost always ended in massacre of the insurgents, whatever reform might eventually be made after the whiners had been eliminated.  The big exception to insurgents losing was the English revolution, which went the way all revolutions seem to go: dissolving into corruption until something eventuates and it cracks.
 The absolute monarchs of that time came about because political competition had gone national and little principalities just couldn't compete any more.  In Europe at the time it was "obvious" to all who did government that nobles, with their parochial interest in their family holdings and fortunes, would be pushovers against the neighboring absolute monarch unless they were forced to tow the line by their own absolute monarch.  All they had to do, by the 18th century, was look at Poland, where the monarch's will was subject to a veto by any noble for any reason.  No way to run a war, which was most of what Poland was involved in then, and that formerly great state dissolved in argument and aristocratic selfishness.
 In Russia they had the same situation of local power that had to be reigned in by the tsar if anything big was going to get done.  Remember that the tsar was technically elected by an assembly, they called it the zemsky sobor, composed of nobles of land, lineage, and church, big money people and an occasional free peasant, increasingly hard to find.  They would go ahead and confirm a tsar's son if one was available, but a tsar without the assembly was just not right.  At least not in 1613, when Mikhail Feodorovich Romanov was acclaimed tsar of all the Russias.
 Mikhail was an adolescent on his enthronement, so the government was in the hands of regents, initially his father, who happened to be the Orthodox patriarch.  The Poles had been kicked out of Moscow but they were still in Russia, and by the way they owned Ukraine at the time, the part that the Crimean Tatars didn't own.
 And that reminds me.  A letter I got about my last article took me to task for my use of the neologism "Litho-Poles" to describe the monarchic federation of those two countries into one in the 16th and 17th centuries.  Inaccurate, I was advised.  OK, fine, they didn't call themselves that.  But this is about Russia, not Lithuania-Poland, to the Russians it didn't matter who they were, they were invaders.  Part of the bad moods that these peoples and their governments have put each other in for 500 years.
 And I must further touch on the ethnic evolutions that have produced today three peoples who feel today themselves to be separate ethnic groups but who share a common ancestry.  I refer to the ones now called Russians, on occasion called Great Russians, the Ukrainians, who used to be called Little Russians, and the Belarussians, belo is "white."  Maybe 300 years ago none of these people thought of themselves as different groups.  They spoke more or less the same language, had more or less the same customs.  It was only those superficial bagatelles politics and religion that sometimes interfered with their business.
 I read a book, "A History of Russia," by G. Vernadsky (not the guy on the 1993 commemorative coin).  He wrote that in the 19th century ethnic nationalist Ukrainians and Belarussians did etymological research and constructed the modern languages now spoken by those people as part of the romantic push for national self-determination that has so strongly affected political thought for the last 200 years.  Mr. Vernadsky was a (Great) Russian.  I dare say a Ukrainian or Belarussian might look at the same facts and interpret them differently.
 This is important, even in a numismatic sense, because the Russians eventually took over in Ukraine and Belarus, at the expense of Poland-Lithuania, and when they did they were not nice.  They were never nice in their governing style.  The people they governed resented, occasionally rebelled.  The Russian government liked to crush and repress.  That's just what they did.  You did what they told you to do, or you ran away.  Like the Cossacks.  To Ukraine.
 And when the Poles were running Ukraine, during the reign of Mikhail Romanov, etc. they were using Polish coins of course, which was the standard Germanic range of silver denominations and gold ducats while the Russians were still lugging around bags of tiny kopeks.  How are you going to buy provisions for the army with kopeks?  Those talers the Poles used would be so convenient.  Thus the yefimoks, which we'll discuss later.
 And one more thing.  Why aren't the wire kopeks in the Standard Catalog?  They're the only Russian coins of the period that you can get easily.  What if they did that with British coins?  Nothing listed below halfcrowns.
 Anyway, Mikhail's government had to deal with enemy Polish-Lithuanians and with Swedes, sometimes enemy, sometimes ally when mutually convenient.  Those two were fighting each other so each had some incentive to get Russia out of the picture.  War and diplomacy produced in 1617 a settlement in which Russia gave up all of its Baltic coast to Sweden.  The Polish-Lithuanian presence was stabilized by a 13 year treaty in 1619.  A big chunk of western Russia stayed occupied.
 The processes of centralization and bureaucratization continued under Mikhail.  Nobles began to be required to provide services and funding that previously they had not, taxation policy was messed with.  We see how politically explosive taxation is today, then it was no different.  Nobody wants to pay taxes, only some people can rig the system to minimize their exposure.  The bills have to be paid or things fall apart, so there is always a tendency to make the people who can most easily be forced to pay to pay.  The tsar's government could hit the nobles, who had money or land, the merchants, who had money, the peasants, whether they had money or not, and maybe some of the private "non-profits" of the time, i.e. the church.
 And there was required service too.  Nobles had to donate their labor and the labor of their peasants, by this time transformed most of the way to serfs.  Serfs were basically sharecroppers who were not allowed to leave.  The noble's point of view was that the peasants were how they got everything done, everything was harder those days, how about the government help them keep their production units in line?  So that by the end of the 17th century descendents of formerly free peasants had become in all but the most nitpicky technical sense slaves.
 Taxes on the bottom end of society increased about five fold during the 17th century.  It felt to everyone like they couldn't breathe.  Riots broke out in Moscow over things like a tax on salt.  Disorder became endemic during Mikhail's reign.  There was always something going on, troops sent here and there to restore order.
 And some nuttiness.  The patriach banned musical instruments in 1636.  Echoes of the Taliban.  A couple of show bonfires.  Reveals a Russian governmental trait: busybodyism.
 And Russians, sent by the government, reached the Pacific ocean in 1639.
 They say Mikhail was a nice guy himself.  Got a bad leg in an accident.  10 children.
 OK, coins.  For Mikhail there are silver kopeks, dengas and polushkas.  Mints are Moscow, Novgorod, and Pskov.  Moscow kopeks are common.  Melnikova charted the matrices and assigned dates.  Everything else is rare.
 Some numismatic side issues during Mikhail.  The coins of the People's Corps, previously discussed, of Yaroslavl and briefly of Moscow, in Mikhail's name, struck for a few years around 1613.  Extremely rare.  Also Swedish imitations of Mikhail coins.  Merely rare.
 And then there was the matter of the Danish dennings.  Recall the coins of the English Muscovy Company of the time of Boris Godunov.  They were apparently approved by the Moscow government for use at the English trading trading station in Archangel and from there found their way into the general circulation, from whence a few have survived to be collected.  The English company was underfunded and folded.
 The king of Denmark wanted in on the Russian trade but found his aims blocked by Sweden so was forced to slog all the way around (Danish) Norway up to the Arctic ocean.  Avoiding Archangel, his people continued east to set up a small station at the mouth of the Pechora river.  They carried with them some quantity of imitation Mikhail kopeks manufactured in Copenhagen.  They traded them to the locals and they entered the circulation to cause trouble.  1619, year of the Polish treaty.
 The whole enterprise was an irritation to Moscow.  Denmark had exchanged correspondence about the enterprise in advance but the Russians had said "Don't" and Denmark had replied "Thankyou, here's the schedule, we're on our way."  The dennings, the Danes called them, were definitely not authorized.  Russia complained and threatened, Denmark made placatory noises and continued to do its trade thing.  Finally the Russians sent up some cops and the Danes were arrested.
 Russia did not bother to tell Denmark that it had their people.  The Danes meanwhile sent up a second expedition some months later and learned of the situation.  Diplomacy ensued for months, at the end of which a clearance came from Moscow, but the cargo had deteriorated and it was too late to do anything anyway.  The Danes went home for the winter.  1620.
 Wrangling ensued.  Denmark whined and asked Moscow for indemnity for lost business, Moscow replied that the trip was not authorized, the region was dangerous, those guys were lucky to have gotten out alive.  And so forth for some years.
 1623.  Denmark sent an official raiding party up to the Russian arctic where they seized and despoiled a customs house for "indemnity."  More nasty letters for many years, but that was the end of the Danish interlude on Russian soil.
 There are three main types of Danish kopek imitations.  The early type was very slightly underweight blundered Mikhail types, some with a "mintmark" P, perhaps for the Copenhagen mintmaster.  Later types were lighter still with meaningless pseudo-cyrillic legends or with Danish legends written in Gothic Roman letters.  Very rare, all of them.

+++

RUSSIA - part 11

 I started writing this survey of Russian numis-history just about the time the bubble burst.  Russian coins and notes had been on a roll, price-wise, for getting on 7 years.  The rise had been built by Russian prosperity; the top end by the numismatic vanity of Russian nouveaux riches, the lower end, where I live and work, dragged along by rising middle class prosperity and investor me-tooism.
 Now "they" all say the bubble has burst, Russian coins are in the dustbin of history.
 Not my experience.  The stupid prices for good stuff have evaporated, but I am still selling just about everything I get for ++ prices, and you know I don't specialize in quality.  Prices far in excess of SCWC (and paper, nothing to discuss, still hot).
 By the way, in general, SCWC prices OVERALL, taken as a whole, which were seriously obsolete, by and large, last year, are, in my opinion, now substantially closer to the real situation at the moment.  Don't you think?  Except for precious metals of course, which are set to the wrong spot.  Maybe they should change all of the precious metal prices to "spot + ...").
 We live in a world in which in most countries ordinary people are allowed to have opinions about things that matter: politics, religion, economics.  They ("we") may or may not be able to do anything about what we think, but we are free to think it, maybe, in some places talk about it.  Ordinary people have a say in politics in most places these days, if only in terms of a "public opinion" to which some attention must be paid by those whose hands are on the levers.
 Back then, 17th century, the big new idea was an extension of a very old idea: the infallible monarch whose word was law.  Everybody was supposed to do what they were told.  Period.  Unless of course they were very rich and/or connected.  And if you didn't like it you could run away, which was illegal, or you could rebel, which almost always ended in massacre of the insurgents, whatever reform might eventually be made after the whiners had been eliminated.  The big exception to insurgents losing was the English revolution, which went the way all revolutions seem to go: dissolving into corruption until something eventuates and it cracks.
 The absolute monarchs of that time came about because political competition had gone national and little principalities just couldn't compete any more.  In Europe at the time it was "obvious" to all who did government that nobles, with their parochial interest in their family holdings and fortunes, would be pushovers against the neighboring absolute monarch unless they were forced to tow the line by their own absolute monarch.  All they had to do, by the 18th century, was look at Poland, where the monarch's will was subject to a veto by any noble for any reason.  No way to run a war, which was most of what Poland was involved in then, and that formerly great state dissolved in argument and aristocratic selfishness.
 In Russia they had the same situation of local power that had to be reigned in by the tsar if anything big was going to get done.  Remember that the tsar was technically elected by an assembly, they called it the zemsky sobor, composed of nobles of land, lineage, and church, big money people and an occasional free peasant, increasingly hard to find.  They would go ahead and confirm a tsar's son if one was available, but a tsar without the assembly was just not right.  At least not in 1613, when Mikhail Feodorovich Romanov was acclaimed tsar of all the Russias.
 Mikhail was an adolescent on his enthronement, so the government was in the hands of regents, initially his father, who happened to be the Orthodox patriarch.  The Poles had been kicked out of Moscow but they were still in Russia, and by the way they owned Ukraine at the time, the part that the Crimean Tatars didn't own.
 And that reminds me.  A letter I got about my last article took me to task for my use of the neologism "Litho-Poles" to describe the monarchic federation of those two countries into one in the 16th and 17th centuries.  Inaccurate, I was advised.  OK, fine, they didn't call themselves that.  But this is about Russia, not Lithuania-Poland, to the Russians it didn't matter who they were, they were invaders.  Part of the bad moods that these peoples and their governments have put each other in for 500 years.
 And I must further touch on the ethnic evolutions that have produced today three peoples who feel today themselves to be separate ethnic groups but who share a common ancestry.  I refer to the ones now called Russians, on occasion called Great Russians, the Ukrainians, who used to be called Little Russians, and the Belarussians, belo is "white."  Maybe 300 years ago none of these people thought of themselves as different groups.  They spoke more or less the same language, had more or less the same customs.  It was only those superficial bagatelles politics and religion that sometimes interfered with their business.
 I read a book, "A History of Russia," by G. Vernadsky (not the guy on the 1993 commemorative coin).  He wrote that in the 19th century ethnic nationalist Ukrainians and Belarussians did etymological research and constructed the modern languages now spoken by those people as part of the romantic push for national self-determination that has so strongly affected political thought for the last 200 years.  Mr. Vernadsky was a (Great) Russian.  I dare say a Ukrainian or Belarussian might look at the same facts and interpret them differently.
 This is important, even in a numismatic sense, because the Russians eventually took over in Ukraine and Belarus, at the expense of Poland-Lithuania, and when they did they were not nice.  They were never nice in their governing style.  The people they governed resented, occasionally rebelled.  The Russian government liked to crush and repress.  That's just what they did.  You did what they told you to do, or you ran away.  Like the Cossacks.  To Ukraine.
 And when the Poles were running Ukraine, during the reign of Mikhail Romanov, etc. they were using Polish coins of course, which was the standard Germanic range of silver denominations and gold ducats while the Russians were still lugging around bags of tiny kopeks.  How are you going to buy provisions for the army with kopeks?  Those talers the Poles used would be so convenient.  Thus the yefimoks, which we'll discuss later.
 And one more thing.  Why aren't the wire kopeks in the Standard Catalog?  They're the only Russian coins of the period that you can get easily.  What if they did that with British coins?  Nothing listed below halfcrowns.
 Anyway, Mikhail's government had to deal with enemy Polish-Lithuanians and with Swedes, sometimes enemy, sometimes ally when mutually convenient.  Those two were fighting each other so each had some incentive to get Russia out of the picture.  War and diplomacy produced in 1617 a settlement in which Russia gave up all of its Baltic coast to Sweden.  The Polish-Lithuanian presence was stabilized by a 13 year treaty in 1619.  A big chunk of western Russia stayed occupied.
 The processes of centralization and bureaucratization continued under Mikhail.  Nobles began to be required to provide services and funding that previously they had not, taxation policy was messed with.  We see how politically explosive taxation is today, then it was no different.  Nobody wants to pay taxes, only some people can rig the system to minimize their exposure.  The bills have to be paid or things fall apart, so there is always a tendency to make the people who can most easily be forced to pay to pay.  The tsar's government could hit the nobles, who had money or land, the merchants, who had money, the peasants, whether they had money or not, and maybe some of the private "non-profits" of the time, i.e. the church.
 And there was required service too.  Nobles had to donate their labor and the labor of their peasants, by this time transformed most of the way to serfs.  Serfs were basically sharecroppers who were not allowed to leave.  The noble's point of view was that the peasants were how they got everything done, everything was harder those days, how about the government help them keep their production units in line?  So that by the end of the 17th century descendents of formerly free peasants had become in all but the most nitpicky technical sense slaves.
 Taxes on the bottom end of society increased about five fold during the 17th century.  It felt to everyone like they couldn't breathe.  Riots broke out in Moscow over things like a tax on salt.  Disorder became endemic during Mikhail's reign.  There was always something going on, troops sent here and there to restore order.
 And some nuttiness.  The patriach banned musical instruments in 1636.  Echoes of the Taliban.  A couple of show bonfires.  Reveals a Russian governmental trait: busybodyism.
 And Russians, sent by the government, reached the Pacific ocean in 1639.
 They say Mikhail was a nice guy himself.  Got a bad leg in an accident.  10 children.
 OK, coins.  For Mikhail there are silver kopeks, dengas and polushkas.  Mints are Moscow, Novgorod, and Pskov.  Moscow kopeks are common.  Melnikova charted the matrices and assigned dates.  Everything else is rare.
 Some numismatic side issues during Mikhail.  The coins of the People's Corps, previously discussed, of Yaroslavl and briefly of Moscow, in Mikhail's name, struck for a few years around 1613.  Extremely rare.  Also Swedish imitations of Mikhail coins.  Merely rare.
 And then there was the matter of the Danish dennings.  Recall the coins of the English Muscovy Company of the time of Boris Godunov.  They were apparently approved by the Moscow government for use at the English trading trading station in Archangel and from there found their way into the general circulation, from whence a few have survived to be collected.  The English company was underfunded and folded.
 The king of Denmark wanted in on the Russian trade but found his aims blocked by Sweden so was forced to slog all the way around (Danish) Norway up to the Arctic ocean.  Avoiding Archangel, his people continued east to set up a small station at the mouth of the Pechora river.  They carried with them some quantity of imitation Mikhail kopeks manufactured in Copenhagen.  They traded them to the locals and they entered the circulation to cause trouble.  1619, year of the Polish treaty.
 The whole enterprise was an irritation to Moscow.  Denmark had exchanged correspondence about the enterprise in advance but the Russians had said "Don't" and Denmark had replied "Thankyou, here's the schedule, we're on our way."  The dennings, the Danes called them, were definitely not authorized.  Russia complained and threatened, Denmark made placatory noises and continued to do its trade thing.  Finally the Russians sent up some cops and the Danes were arrested.
 Russia did not bother to tell Denmark that it had their people.  The Danes meanwhile sent up a second expedition some months later and learned of the situation.  Diplomacy ensued for months, at the end of which a clearance came from Moscow, but the cargo had deteriorated and it was too late to do anything anyway.  The Danes went home for the winter.  1620.
 Wrangling ensued.  Denmark whined and asked Moscow for indemnity for lost business, Moscow replied that the trip was not authorized, the region was dangerous, those guys were lucky to have gotten out alive.  And so forth for some years.
 1623.  Denmark sent an official raiding party up to the Russian arctic where they seized and despoiled a customs house for "indemnity."  More nasty letters for many years, but that was the end of the Danish interlude on Russian soil.
 There are three main types of Danish kopek imitations.  The early type was very slightly underweight blundered Mikhail types, some with a "mintmark" P, perhaps for the Copenhagen mintmaster.  Later types were lighter still with meaningless pseudo-cyrillic legends or with Danish legends written in Gothic Roman letters.  Very rare, all of them.
 Will have to do Alexei Mikhailovich next time.  First crown sized Russian coins.

1645-76
1645 age 16
salt riot etc
Poland / khmelnitsky
1653 war against poland planned

 In the 17th century the normal attitude of governing elites was that the people who made up the countries that they ruled were resources for the promotion of their policies.  The foundational concept on which they built their governing rationales was "legitimacy," the assertion that because they had been in the saddle holding the whip since the time of their distant ancestors, or that their religious authorities had announced divine blessing on their rule, they were, as it were, "entitled," and that all of their subjects must submit unconditionally and obey all commands explicit and implicit.  One of our founding concepts in this country; that what is not forbidden is permitted, was not in the thought process back then, you'd better ask before you did anything, wait for the answer.  No answer, keep waiting.
 In the absence of a powerful national government warlordism developed.  This was noticed over and over for at least 2500 years.  The end result of warlordism, it was further noticed, was that a conqueror eventually emerged, either one of the local warlords or a foreign invader.  Typically that person warred and then ruled with great ferocity and a peace of fear was imposed until that person died, at which point either a dynasty was founded or the generals began a civil war and anarchy returned.
 Laws were developed as attempts to get out of the box of personal rule, something to refer to besides the momentary personal whims of the ruler.

+++

A comet was noticed by a guy in England, one Edmund Halley, in 1682, and Mt. Vesuvius in Italy erupted.  French king Louis XIV completed his new palace in Versailles and moved in with his thousands of courtiers and staff.  In Massachusetts colony they finally gave up making pine tree shillings.  And in Russia the Tsar died.
The death of Feodor Alexeyevich Romanov precipitated what had become the normal turmoil of succession in Russia.  He was a sick guy, no children, the next in line was Feodor’s 16 year old brother, Ivan, but the kid was sickly as well, and thought to have mental problems.  Plus, the chief minister of poor departed Alexei was one Anton Matveyev, friend, as it happened, of Alexei’s second wife.  She had a hale and hearty 10 year old boy, Peter, Matveyev started wheels turning, a council of nobles was convened, selected Peter over the lawful but jinxed Ivan, his mother to be regent.  A popular assembly then ratified the choice.  That, by the way, was the last popular assembly convened by the tsars until the 20th century.
A normal progression of events proceeded to unfold.  The sister of the spurned Ivan called in some chips amongst the Moscow guard.  A revolt was put into play, reaching all the way into the Kremlin, where Peter got to watch some of his family and friends killed by the soldiers.
The rebels got half a loaf for their troubles, perhaps 2/3.  It was arranged that Peter and Ivan would be joint tsars, Ivan’s sister Sophia to be regent.  Peter would seem to be in a bad situation there, but he was a necessary cog in the machinery of state because Ivan couldn’t do anything.  So Peter would spend most of his time at a country house, brought to the palace when needed.  The kids would sit together on this double throne they built with a hole in the back.  Sophia would sit back there feeding Peter his lines while he did state business, the other guy pretending he wasn’t talking to Sophia.  Ivan just sat there.
Sophia essentially ruled until 1689, first female ruler in Russia.  She made some diplomatic progress with Poland and China.   Military ventures against the Turks were not successful.
Peter turned 17 in 1689.  He was thinking for himself by then.  With his family they decided to try to get rid of the regent.  Sophia got wind of it, everybody knew everybody, Peter and Ivan were friends.  She tried her trick with the Moscow guard again but it didn’t work, she had to give up, Peter’s faction stuck her in a monastery and kept her there until she died.
Peter’s mother became regent until her death in 1694.  Ivan died in 1696 and Ivan became sole ruler.  Beginning of modern Russia.
The coins of the dual tsarship.  There are silver kopeks of Ivan V, I’ve never been in the presence of one, must be rare, I suppose.  And there are kopeks for Peter too.  These Peter regency kopeks differ from the sole rule type by having the mint name MOC KBA under the horse instead of the date.  The legend is different as well.  These are rare but not as rare as the Ivans.
And there is this coin, famous in some circles, the Sevsk chekh that the Russians made in 1686 to compete with the overwhelmingly popular and ubiquitous Polish billon driepelker in Ukraine.  That project had been on the drawing board for more than a decade and when they finally cut the dies and dragged the machinery out to Sevsk in southern Russia they made them for like one day or something because there are like 20 of them known.  But what they struck got circulated.  One ended up in a batch of Polish driepelkers, Jerry Anaczewicz picked it up at a NYINC, probably 1990.  Made the news in Russian coin circles, let me tell you.
None of these coins are in the SCWC.
The most likely thing for you to run into of the 2 tsars period is a gold medal with the kids on one side and Sophia holding the scepter of most mighty power on the other.  It comes in various small sizes and was awarded for participation in Sophia’s military ventures in Crimea.  Seems like they show up in auctions not infrequently, but I think most or maybe all of those specimens have been novodels.  Cute though.
Peter was a dynamic guy.  As soon as he got the reigns of state he went galloping off into the glorious future, dragging his country behind him.  Most of his future was military, and refreshingly for an autocrat, it was all strategic and none of it vainglorious.  Compare with, say, Louis XIV.  Peter’s wars were for traditional Russian goals: access to the sea, securing and extending the land borders.  His ideas tended toward national mobilization, suppression of nobles, modern technology, modern architecture, modern clothes, shave that beard.  He did he modernizing in the classic Russian manner: force.  Peter insisted that all of his orders be obeyed by everyone.  Police were sent out in the streets to cut off beards.  He crushed all attempts at opposition, famously having one of his sons put to death late in his reign.  Built St. Petersburg.  Built the Russian navy.  Established the Russian empire.
And, finally, a hundred years after they first considered it, he reformed the coinage.
Part of Peter’s national mobilization scheme involved the development of industry, particularly metallurgy (for guns, etc.), therefore mining, etc.  The people to do these things came partly from labor assessments on private estates, but more from the serfs of state lands who were reassigned to industry.  As production increased at the factories and mines set up to supply the military the need for coinage reform grew more acute.
Old style wire kopeks were made from 1696 to 1715.  Those coins, in the final theoretical reduction of 0.28g, had old style dates under the horse.  They are the ones that are commonly available on the market, usually with the date off flan.  Peter was recorded as calling them “lice.”  The factories just couldn’t do business with them – too small.  And they were doing suddenly a lot more foreign trade, which was all thalers and ducats.  A large purchase required bags of kopeks, had to hire people to count them.  People cut the tiny kopeks for small change, or they used tokens of leather, wood, etc.  Very few of those tokens have survived, if you see one and it looks old it is probably a 19th century fake made for collectors back then.
In 1699 they launched the first new style silver coins, but before I start on this new style money I ought to point out some market and scholarly aspects of this series.  Though the title “imperator” was not granted until 1721 (by Peter’s “senate,” a puppet council of high nobles put together so the tsar could browbeat them all at the same time) all of these modern style coins are thought of as Russian imperial back to that first poltina (half ruble) of 1699.  These are the coins that had that tremendous price appreciation over the last 10 years, the one that peaked around June of 2008 and has since moderated from ridiculous to merely outrageous.
There is a fairly sizeable corps of extremely dedicated collectors, dealers, and scholars paying very close attention to imperial Russian coins.  They have been active since the early 19th century.  They write a lot at a very high level.  There is a group called the Russian Numismatic Society, www.russiannumismaticsociety.org.  I’ve been a member for 20 years or so.  Their journal is always top notch.
The imperial series is all dated, many people dream the impossible dream of a complete set, no more possible for Russian than for British or American, but imaginable in a way that German states coins, for instance, are not.  And there have been many books written on various aspects of imperial Russian numismatics.  Most useful to me over the years have been Brekke’s book on copper, Julian’s book on silver, Uzdenikov’s on the whole series.  The current book of greatest popularity seems to be the one by Bitkin.  If I’m not mistaken all of them are at the moment out of print, but I found the Bitkin catalog available online so go find it if you want to.
The first new style coin was the 1699 poltina, set to the weight of the standard central European half thaler.  Copper dengas and polushkas followed in 1700.  People remembered the disaster of the copper kopeks of the previous century and the new coins had to be forced into use.  Gold coins in 1701, ducats and double ducats, they called them chervonetzes.  From that time other denominations were rolled out: silver polupoltinnik (half of a half ruble or 25 kopeks) and grivennik (10 kopeks) in 1703, copper kopek and silver ruble in 1704.  They kept making new coins, lots of them, adding new denominations from time to time, from then on.  From 1699 to 1917 there is no date for which some coins were not struck.
If you look in one of the books on the series you see a number of different types of circulating coins for Peter and a lot of patterns.  There are also those novodels struck, often at government mints, for collectors, some from original dies, reworked or not, others concocted de novo to fill a “hole” in some collector’s concept.  Some people consider novodels to be  irritating problems, other people like them for themselves, nice antique objects that look like real coins and remind us that people have been collecting coins for several hundred years.  As you might expect, a few items are in dispute, pattern or novodel, not sure.
That said, I think we can consider that the reformed Peter coinage is presented fairly completely in the SCWC, though the prices are not real at the moment.  Some background and detail may be helpful.
All of Peter’s coins were struck in Moscow, but there were actually four mints in that city during his reign.  To keep things confusing, they didn’t always use their own mintmarks, for instance in the case of the “BK” kopeks of 1704-18, struck at 2 of the Moscow mints on the order of the newly created “great treasury” as opposed to some other government agency.  This harks back to the old Russian practice of big cheeses ordering money from the mint for their business purposes.  Under Peter it was different government agencies.
And some coins have “of the xxxx mint” on their edge, with perhaps a different mint indicator elsewhere.  Those would be overstrikes.
All Peter coins have become rare to the point of unavailability these days.  There are things that have been fairly common until recently, copper kopeks and dengas and late 5 kopeks, silver roubles.  They’re still around but the prices have become ridiculously high.  Owners do not want to sell.  (Quick – what’s the right price for a coin?  Only one person wants it.)  This has actually been the case for perhaps a decade.  Any Peter coin (except the wire kopeks of course) disappears as soon as offered, no matter how ugly.  Fakes arose to take their place, most made in the 90s.  Not just fake rubles either, but also copious quantities of fake coppers.  Usually the quality of those fakes was low, but they were common for a while.  People in Russia with machine shops and nothing to do.  They made fake military medals too.  Plenty of them still around.  Some of them make it into auctions from time to time.
I went to Ebay, searched “Peter rouble.” I got about 40 items.  2 were genuine at you-are-a-fool prices.  The rest were crude fakes, not so noted, all from a guy in Ukraine.  I searched “Peter kopeck” and got a lot or wires and a few coppers, all genuine, laughter through tears prices.
Peter’s small silver coins are way scarcer than the rubles, so those prices in SCWC are probably extra-meaningless.
I should call attention to the shostak and tympf KM# 126 & 127.  They are Polish denominations made in 1707 for payments in Belarus, part of Ukraine, and other western territories.  Like the Sevsk chekhs before them they only made a few, probably found it was cheaper to just use the Polish coins.

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RUSSIA - part 13

Peter the Great died in 1725.  From then until 1796 only a bit less than 5 years were not presided over by women.  Four women, all enthroned by schemers who thought they could run things behind the scenes because they were “just” women.  All of them held their own against their wouldbe controllers, 3 of them stomped them pretty well and ruled as true autocrats.
I have to keep reminding myself that autocracy was considered to be a progressive idea back then.  The main problem, according to the forward thinkers, was that localism (nobles) could not get their act together to protect the interests of the larger community, a super-boss, they theorized,  was required to whip them into line.  That’s what they thought.  Maybe they were right, for that time.  And force was the normal way you’d get people to do things.  Tell them what to do, if they say anything about it thrash them up good.
Peter had bludgeoned his country onto the path of modernity, of industry and grand military venture.  We can think of it as a national transformation for war.  I’m briefly intrigued by some structural similarities with German national socialism, though the flavors are dramatically different.  And the methods of Stalin’s “socialism in one country” are clearly based on Petrine concepts.
Successfully redirected towards a European style future, the war over for the moment, Russia was rather depleted at the time of Peter’s death.
Peter’s private life was a mess all the way through.  Tumultuous childhood, very bad first marriage, he wangled a divorce and stuck her in a monastery, bad relations with the only son who survived infancy, he ended up killing the kid when he was a young adult.  Very messy.  Shades of Ivan the Terrible.
The second wife was Livonian, common born, who wandered through various fortuitous menial situations until she encountered this guy Menshikov, who was Peter’s best buddy.  Menshikov was, ideologically speaking, a pure and ardent Petrist “progressive,” but he was also severely in it for himself.  He had class affinities with the woman, Marta, they had a sort of aspirational thing in common.  Peter loved her deeply and well.  They marrie
36d,
 she changed her name to Catherine, they had 9 (one source said 12) children, 7 (or was it 1 ?) died, one became empress later on.
So Peter died, there was no will, one would have imagined that the heir was supposed to be Peter II, son of Peter’s son by first wife, but that first wife, still alive and stuck in a monastery, was the linchpin of the conservative faction of reactionary nobles who wanted Russia to go back to being the anarchic playground of their honored ancestors, if the absolutist progressives were going to hold on to their hard won modern state (and their personal fortunes) they’d have to act fast.  Menshikov put together a faction of palace guards to acclaim Catherine, who was, after all, the empress since 1721.  Weapons and faits accomplis duly presented, Catherine (and Menshikov) carried on through her death in 1727.
She is said to have been a just ruler.
Of course we don’t have many coins of her reign.  Money was tight, she wasn’t around long. There are copper 5 kopeks of 1725, which, Peter dying in January, are technically Catherine’s.  You can find these, figure on paying maybe twice or thrice the SCWC price, and be wary of fakes.  Peter portrait poltinas and rubles were struck in 1725, two varieties of Catherine portrait rubles too.
For 1726 there is a rare copper kopek, available copper 5 kopeks from 2 different Moscow mints, rare silver 10 and 25 kopeks.  Catherine portrait poltinas and rubles from Moscow and St. Petersburg mint with bust left and right, several patterns, all are rare these days, rubles least so I guess.  I had a ruble once, back in the 90s when such things were floating around.  And there are gold 2 rubles, but for most of us most of the time its never mind about that.
1727 coins are copper  kopeks – MD and ND are available, KD is rare, rare silver 10 kopeks, and varieties of politinas and rubles, might as well think of them as rare too, all of them.
And there are the copper plate coins.  This was an idea floated to work on the war depleted economy.  The Russians watched the Swedes do it and it seemed interesting.  The basic idea was that those big chunks of copper would be theoretically “worth” the same amount in silver.  That as opposed to the lightweight token copper 5 kopeks.  You (the government) save the silver and gold to pay people with clout, ordinary people get the copper foisted on them.  The Russian government made the plate money in various denominations at the newly established mint at Ekaterinburg.  But they decided it was not feasible so they didn’t go farther than a few test coins.  Very rare as originals, there are “real” novodels of many of them, and then there are “modern” novodels, which is to say fakes.  Seems to me several novodels have shown up in auctions in recent years, maybe no originals.
We return to the bloody soap opera of Russian imperial politics.  With Catherine dead Menshikov, the power behind the throne, had to make a deal with his enemies, the conservative faction, because the only logical candidate for succession was Peter, grandson of that son of Peter the Great who had been made him suffer and die without actually bweing formally executed.  Young Peter was 12, poorly educated, poorly socialized.  He represented the anti-Peter faction of the nobility, whose corporate dream was the dissolution of the empire and the reestablishment of the autonomies of the great families.
Really.  How could Menshikov have imagined he could make a deal with those people?  I mean, he was a progressive and all, but he was also a tremendous grafter and vainglorious in the pompous way they liked to strut back then.  Even people on his side didn’t like him.  Anyway, Menshikov had his hands on Peter for a couple of months, then the Petrists got the upper hand and took him back, arrested Menshikov, confiscated all his stuff, and packed him and his family off to Siberia, where they were cold and hungry and he died two years later.  Evdochia, first wife of Peter the Great and mater familias of the conservatives, was brought out of her monastery and installed with due pomp in a palace of her own.
But Peter’s handlers did not get much time to roll the clock back.  Peter died of smallpox on the day his premature wedding.  1727-30 his reign was, three non-notable years.
We’ve already discussed the 1727 copper, which did not carry portraits or titles.  There was a new type of kopek in 1728 with St. George spearing the dragon, scarce, same type dated 1730, scarcer.  There is a Moscow mint poltina, rare, Moscow and Petersburg rubles, rare (I had a Moscow once), rarer rubles of 1728 and 1729, very rare gold 2 rubles and ducats of various dates.
The conservatives who were running things for Peter had a pretty clear choice for successor, but it was a girl.  Well, that had happened before, so they were used to it, but she, Elizabeth, was also the daughter of Peter the Great and that miserable excuse for an empress Catherine the strumpet.  So they went all the way to Courland in Latvia where Anna, daughter of Peter’s brother Ivan V, was duchess.  They wanted her to sign a constitution they had drawn up putting control in their hands.  Anna signed, and when she got to Russia and was duly installed she made friends with the guards and arranged a palace coup.  Fully in charge for the next 10 years, she ruled Russia in the Petrine manner: ruthlessly, militaristically, grindingly.  She liked to publicly humiliate her enemies.  Well, at least she wasn’t into mass murder.
Anna’s big problem, from the Russian point of view, was that she acted like a German, and had brought her German retinue with her when she came to Russia.  She had been sent to Courland, to be the 13 year old bride of the young duke there, who proceeded to die within a year.  Anna had stayed and grown up in a German milieu, so that she didn’t seem Russian to the Russians.  That rankled, plus the standard high handed behaviors and policies one expects of autocrats.  She was popular neither with the people nor with the nobles, but the guard and the army liked her, so why should she care?
Some of Anna’s coins are common, being the new larger copper denga (half kopek) introduced in 1730 and continued after her death, and companion polushkas (1/4 kopek).  There are quite a few of the dengas around, typically not well struck, often porous or corroded, fewer of the polushkas.  Silver 10 kopeks of 1731-35 are rare, quarter rubles of 1730 and different type of 1740 are rare, several varieties of poltinas and rubles, all rare and expensive these days.  Again, I had an Anna ruble back in the good old days, I forget which one.  For gold she only struck a few ducats, 1730 and another type in 1739-9, rare of course.
By the way, the main gold coin in use throughout the world at that time?  The Dutch standing knight ducat.
Anna never remarried after the death of her teenaged Courlandish husband.  Toward the end of her life she named as successor her grand-nephew, Ivan, a one year old baby, born in another German court (Mecklenburg-Schwerin) to the daughter of her sister.  Anyone except a descendent of Peter the Great.  Well, Ivan VI lasted all of two months before Elizabeth, the real live daughter of Peter, pulled the old charm-the-guards trick.  Baby Ivan was hustled off to jail, where he stayed for 24 years before finally being murdered.  Just another not nice Russian politics story.
But some coins were issued in his name, with his tiny baby bust.  There’s a Moscow 10 kopek, poltinas and rubles of Moscow and Petersburg, all rare of course, usually what you see are counterfeit rubles, even they are not very common, everyone knows they’re rare, if you’re going to make a fake it had better be good, no one’s going to believe it anyway.
You will notice that that baby emperor we call Ivan VI is named on his coins Ioann III.  The “VI” comes from the counting of three grand princes of Moscow, “III” starts the count from Ivan the Terrible, first tsar.  “Ioann” is a Germanic affectation.
You will also notice if you look at the metrology that the ruble had been shrinking during its 18th century run.  Various reasons are always given to justify a devaluation, but they always boil down to two: not enough money on hand and keep the coins at home.  One tends to notice that devaluation and war go together (not to mention graft and embezzlement) , and Russia certainly had plenty of war (and graft and embezzlement) in the 18th century.
Because her parents had been secretly rather than publicly married at the time of her birth Elizabeth’s natal paperwork was irregular and she therefore failed to be hooked up with top level royalty.  She had been betrothed to the prince of Holstein-Gottdorp, a relative of the king of Sweden, but he died before the wedding.  Nothing ever worked out, she came to the Russian throne a spinster and so remained.  There was a lover (or lovers) but no children, so everyone knew there would be a succession problem one more time.
Elizabeth was a peacemaker.  She settled with Russia’s constant enemies Sweden and Turkey, and attempted mildness at home.  She refused to sign death warrants, so there were no executions in Russia during her reign – quite remarkable in any age, probably unique at that time.
Then she got involved in the Seven Years War and things got kind of messed up, but later for that story.
Elizabeth’s coinage is, generally speaking, much more available than that of her predecessors.  The copper began with a continuation of the Anna type dengas (common) and polushkas (less so).  In 1755 a copper kopeck was introduced for the first time in 27 years, its design a baroque fantasy of clouds, lightning, eagle, etc.  Very nice looking coin in high grade, fairly scarce.  In 1757 new standard types were introduced: St. George and dragon for the fractions, 1 kopek and new 2 kopeks denomination, and new “full weight” copper 5 kopeks.  They really pumped out those coppers, consequently they are not difficult to find, though the early dates of those types tend to be pretty worn.  The modules continued for most of four decades.
For silver there were silver 5 and 10 kopeks, quarter and half rubles, and rubles, different portrait types, Moscow and Petersburg mints.  We begin in Elizabeth’s time to see the addition of mintmaster’s initials to the silver coins – an innovation borrowed from the Spanish method – someone could be blamed if there was a problem with the weight or alloy.  One could not reasonably call Elizabeth’s silver coins common, but one is far more likely to run one of hers than of any of her predecessors.
And there is slightly available gold.  Elizabeth had made ducats for euro-prestige, and even showoff double ducats for the first time in 45 years.  Give them to the princes when they visit.  Very rare.  Workhorse 2 rubles of course, found in grades that demonstrate they were actually used, and showoff 5 rubles.  But she also had gold rubles and tiny politinas made for use in court functions (like gambling of an evening’s entertainment).  Those things actually turn up, I’ve had, I think, at least one of the poltinas, rubles, and 2 rubles, but they go away immediately at amazingly high price.

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RUSSIA - part 14

The Seven Years War.  In the early 18th century two Russias came out of diplomatic and military nowhere to become major players in Europe.  One Russia is the enormous and complicated country I’ve been writing about.  The other one?  Prussia.
Before Prussia got pulled together Austria was the Germanic top dog, numbers two and three being Bavaria and Saxony I guess.  The unification of Prussia by modern army proponent Friedrich Wilhelm I was carried out by force to create a nation bore some resemblance to that of Peter in Russia, but less bloody, more efficient.  In both countries every reform was justified in terms of military preparedness.  People were forced to be educated to make better soldiers.  Roads were built for military transit purposes.  And so forth.  Stuff got done.
By 1740 the Prussian army was the biggest and best trained in Europe.  Friedrich Wilhelm I was a peaceable guy who never started a war.  But he was mean to the son who succeeded him.  That was the guy who became Frederick the Great.  Frederick, true to his severe upbringing, was a hard guy.  He considered his job to be the acquisition of the lands that separated the many little bits of Prussian territory scattered like islands in a sea of Austria.  Immediately he invaded the Austrian province of Silesia.  It took two wars over five years to nail down Silesia, but notice had been given to the rest of Europe that there was a new dude on the scene.
By the 1750s the diplomatic alliances had been rearranged.  It had been England-Austria-Russia, etc. against France-Spain-Prussia, etc.  Because Britain developed a bad opinion of Austria as a result of the Silesian War it made a deal with Prussia, so Austria had to go with France, there being nowhere else to go.  That was 1756, Prussia signed with the British and immediately invaded Saxony.  Before it was over battles had been fought all over the world between various belligerents.  That was the Seven Years War.
Russia got involved because the British-Prussian deal hurt Russian interests of all kinds, so empress Elizabeth sent troops against Prussia.  In the normal Russian combat method Elizabeth’s troops ground away at Prussia.  Berlin was briefly occupied.  The war would have ended with the obliteration of Frederick’s kingdom had the Russian empress not died after long illness in 1762.
You would not necessarily deduce the Seven Years War from any changes of Russian domestic coinage, though one could imagine a political allusion in the new St. George and dragon type of the copper, kind of fits the particulars of the new war.  There were coins issued in “East Prussia” with Elizabeth’s portrait from 1759 to 1761 during the campaigning.  East Prussia was part of what is now Poland, a region that was a patchwork of ownership, mostly Prussian and Polish, and Russian activity there interfered with Polish interests no matter what they did.  Poland became progressively weaker through the 18th century, encouraging predation by neighbors.  Constant irritation of each other by Poland and Russia is a long term factor in European history.
Well, so Elizabeth was dead.  Childless herself, she had proclaimed as heir a nephew who became Peter III.  Peter was basically a German except that his grandfather was Peter the Great.  Empress Elizabeth married him to a second cousin of his, also German with a bit of Romanov connection, Sophie Augusta of Anhalt-Zerbst.  Sophie converted to Orthodoxy and changed her name to Catherine.  There was a son, paternity later denied by his wife.  The couple did not otherwise get on.
Peter was something of an odd duck but his big problem was that he ardently admired Frederick the Great.  He immediately switched sides in the Seven Years War and backed Prussia.  That was a tough pill for everyone to swallow, not just Russia.  Plus, he annoyed the bureaucracy by caving in to the nobles on compulsory national service.  Plus he annoyed the guards by imposing additional disciplines according to his foreign tastes.  Like in first Rome, the third Rome had an ongoing problem of palace guards getting involved in successions.  A guards unit arrested him, abdication papers presented and signed, then off to jail.  A month later he was dead, killed.  No paperwork on that.  The guy who did it was not charged.
Peter was on the throne only six months but he shook things up.  He also messed with the coinage.  It had to be done, the war was causing financial problems as wars are wont to do.  Back then money was metal or numbers in books, there was no paper to swell the supply.  When finances were tight the normal “adjustments” would have been debasement or exchange rate manipulation if there happened to be a bimetallic currency, which there was in 18th century Russia.  Theoretically 100 copper kopeks made a silver ruble, but in the shop it was whatever it actually was that day.  A silver ruble was not the same as a copper ruble.
Perhaps, thought the finance ministry, it might be possible to halve the weight of the copper coinage.  The market would hit the new coinage eventually and drive it to its proper value, the losers would be the lower classes, but losing was there job, wasn’t it?
Please recall that Russian finance ministries had had this thought before, had actually tried it, had been burned.  They went ahead anyway, during the short reign of Peter III, turning old 2 kopeks into 4 kopeks and old 5 kopeks into 10 kopeks.  They were serious, made more than a few of them, they circulated for a while and then they were recalled and made illegal by the new empress Catherine.  Most of them were recoined into the restored “full weight” coins.  So look carefully at all of your 1762 and 1763 coppers to see if there is an undertype.  4 and 10 kopeks of 1762 are rare.
There are silver Peter portrait poltinas and rubles, gold 5 and 10 rubles, gold ducats.  They’re all rare in various degrees.
Catherine became empress.  She concentrated on expanding her territory, mostly by military means.  Crimea was acquired, and Lithuania, Belarus, Courland.  And Poland, not to ignore Central Asia, Siberia, and the Far East.  Very interesting 34 years.  But evidently the first thing that had to be addressed was the financial situation.  We know this because the light coppers were immediately recalled and the silver ruble made both lighter and baser.  This change of strategy can be seen as sort of “progressive” in that to some extent people were made to pay the government’s expenses who could actually afford to pay rather than concentrating on those who could more easily be forced to pay.  It’s right there in the coinage.
That done she embarked on her illustrious and controversial career, encouraging science, art, industry, that kind of good stuff but also tightening the screws on serfs, Jews, normal unpleasantness at that time, only in retrospect do we find it nasty.  Probably everything she did was a matter of political necessity.  She repressed Catholics in general (Poles in particular) but invited the Jesuits to hide out in Russia when they were being persecuted in Western Europe.  Everything is so complicated.
For coinage there was the main Russian series, an exotic coinage for Siberia, some coins for newly conquered Crimea, and military coins for occupied Moldavia and Wallachia.
Homeland copper restored the weights and types of empress Elizabeth with new monograms of course.  A number of mints struck copper, some, but not all of them putting their marks on their coins.  The big 5 kopeks from Ekaterinburg are actually common and cheap in ordinary grades, which can typically encompass a bit of porosity acquired from their sojourn in damp basements if not the ground.  It is not impossible that one could make a date set of these coins, maybe even from some of the other mints, Anninsk , “KM” (for Kolyvan, where the copper came from, the actual mint being in a town called Suzun).  But not TM, Feodosia mint in Crimea.  “T” is for “Tauric,” from ancient Greek Tauric Chersonessos.
Catherine acquired Crimea somewhat in the way the United States got Texas.  She went to war with Turkey and got an “independent” khan of Krim in the peace treaty of 1774.  (It was during that war that the Moldavia-Wallachia coins were struck.)  Nine years later Crimea was annexed, 1783.  The Turks went to war to get it back in 1787.  The Russians beat up the Turks.  While they were at it they struck the complete set of normal copper coins with TM mark and a few special silver coins that evidently did not circulate.  The TM coppers are rare.  I’ve seen fakes.
For silver there are 10 kopecks, new denominations 15 and 20 kopeks, traditional quarter and half rubles and rubles.  Used to be the smaller silvers would emerge from time to time, especially the 10 kopeks, quarter rubles too, poltinas were scarcer, rubles more common by far than any other 18th century rubles.  But now anything interesting from Russia is either sky high or not around.  Put any price on them they’ll probably sell.
Same with Catherine’s smaller gold.  Like Elizabeth, Catherine had special gold rubles and poltinas made for use in the palace, and those are common enough that I’ve actually had two of them.  Stupid prices.  No bargains ever.  Her larger gold is similarly the most available of the century, but the prices are still way too high.
There were several experimental issues made at various mints.  Most interesting in my opinion were the copper Sestroretsk rubles of 1770 and 1771.  The government had introduced paper assignat notes.  They had a problem with the backing for the notes, note issuers always want to issue more notes than the value on hand.  It was imagined that the copper rubles might serve as a reserve of value.  But there was machine trouble, more expensive than it was worth, they made about 5 of them maybe.
I saw one once, 1990 I think.  Mme. Melnikova came to the NYINC and brought one to display.  And someone in Raleigh, NC, where I live, told me he had one, and someone else claimed to have seen it, but I never did.  Safe to say that any such you might run into is apt to be a novodel at best.
The Siberian coins were made because they needed some aid to commerce there.  Normal coinage flowed out, there were so many things they had to import.  In an attempt to keep the coinage home they were stuck light.  Siberian coins are not particularly rare but they are not cheap either.  Plenty of fakes around in all denominations.
Catherine died in 1796 shortly after the final partition of Poland.  She had supported the United States against Britain but the French Revolution had been a real scare, knocked the enlightenment right out of her, turned her into a reactionary.  But then she died, so she wasn’t around for the next turn of the screw, which was Napoleon.

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RUSSIA - part 15

There is this concept in politics called legitimacy.  The basic idea is that the ruler(s) have a right to rule because of, you know, something or other.  It might be that they were elected, or accepted by “higher authority,” religious or political, or perhaps only because an ancestor had been accepted by someone at some time.  Conquerors, usurpers, etc. have a problem with “legitimacy” until they can really secure their power, at which point someone can be cajoled or bought or forced to formally accept the interloper and a new chain of legitimacy is started.
The Romanovs of Russia considered themselves to be legitimate monarchs because the first of them had been elected by a council, all or most of the Russian nobles had signed oaths of fealty, the patriarch had blessed young Mikhail Romanov, it was all in order, so would remain in order as long as the Romanovs wanted it seemed.  It was like that everywhere in the world at that time.  Everywhere you went nothing but monarchs claiming legitimacy, doing whatever they pleased in the absolutist fashion of the day.
Then came the questioning philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries wondering what kind of governments might be possible other than monarchy.  In due course some groups of people tried to put something together, among those being some of the colonists in British North America.
Catherine the Great of Russia backed the American colonists against Britain because she was against everything British.  Not that she actually disliked the British, it was all politics, nothing personal.  She was intrigued with the concept of personal liberty and other such “enlightenment” notions, but she never let any of that get in the way of her absolutist governing style.  That first of the modern revolutions turning out successful, the resulting nation being apparently not totally weird and relatively weak, there was some feeling, especially after the peace treaty, that the rest of the world would find a way to live with “republics.”  Besides, from the Russian point of view, France had backed the colonists too, and it was worth paying attention to anything France did, that country had both clout and cachet in abundance.
It came as a shock to all of the other governments of Europe when revolution developed in France.  Not the fact of rebellion, whatever shape it might have taken.  All of the rulers knew that they were mistreating sectors of their populace, that was normal.  Rebellion was normal.  The normal response was to repress the rebels.  What was shocking to the rulers of Europe was the spectacle of the French government giving in, the king handling things “wrong” in a comprehensively incompetent manner, the deterioration of the revolutionary government into various kinds of bad behavior.  The Americans had behaved like “decent human beings” they thought.  The French seemed to go crazy.  The “legitimate” rulers of Europe got really scared, none more than Catherine of Russia.
Not that Catherine’s legitimacy was totally free and clear.  She had a drop of the proper blood in her, but there was that quite iffy way she had come to power, arrest and murder of her husband and all, that created an underlying tension that colored her 34 year old reign and made her in the end a militant defender of the concept of legitimacy that deep down she knew she lacked.
Well, Catherine died in 1796 after watching the successive revolutionary governments come, wreak their havoc, and go.  Various (Germanic) states had invaded France in support of the “legitimate” ruler, Louis XVI, executed in 1793.  By 1795 the revolutionaries had the edge on the invaders, had dealt with some serious internal rebellions, had purged their most radical elements, had put up a new constitution, had after their 1793 experience of terrorizing dictatorship reconstituted their government into a clumsy system of indirect and dispersed rule headed by a “Directory.” A lot of interest groups and their money were outside of the power structure. Further rebellions, supported by outside meddlers such as Great Britain, caused trouble all the way to the streets of Paris, one of them famously suppressed by Napoleon, his first appearance in the media, as it were.
The Directory was in power for about a year.  Perhaps it is fair to say that it completely mismanaged everything except the military work of Napoleon, who was so successful in Italy.  His competence shined like a dawning sun over the stinking corruption of the rest of the French political scene.   They made up a reason more or less and sent him to Egypt to get him out of circulation so they could continue with their various sordid schemes, mostly having to do with confiscation of property and inflationary Zimbabwe-style financial demolition.  Peace talks that had been going on with Austria, etc. were going nowhere and war was going to resume, the only suspense being in which country would move first.
It turned out to be France, preemptively invading Switzerland and expanding its zone of occupation in Italy as far as Rome.  Napoleon was still stuck in Egypt.  Being the bankrupt nation it was, France found itself succumbing to temptation and looting the occupied territories on a grand scale, generating spectacular quantities of ill will.  But this was all the money that was coming in, the most ancient method of state finance: stealing from the neighbors.  To continue the wars they decided they needed universal conscription.  The war ground on.
What does all this have to do with Russia?  Russia was basically shoulder to shoulder The Russian government was intending to back “legitimacy” to the end.  Empress Catherine’s death in 1796 did not change the Russian foreign policy.
Russian troops pushed the French most of the way out of Italy in 1799 but they were defeated in the Low Countries.  Lack of coordination amongst the allies was the cause it seems.  But the situation was dire for France.  The Directory recalled Napoleon from Egypt, but he had actually left before he got their note.  Arrived in France he was supposed to be muscle for a coup by one of the directors but he outmaneuvered his handlers and took power himself.  Shreds of non-monarchic procedure were retained for a while, then dispensed with.  The revolution was over, a personal dictatorship began.
In France nobody minded this change of government, and for the enemies outside there was no change in the situation they thought they were dealing with, which was an aggressive rogue state.
Let’s back up to 1796, considered from the Russian point of view.  The year before Russia, Prussia, and Austria had finished carving up Poland.  Then Catherine died.
Wonderously for the Romanovs there was a grown up son to succeed the departed  empress, Paul.  Typically, for the Romanovs, the mother and son had been at odds possibly all of their lives.  This was the son that perhaps Catherine mentioned in her diary as not her husband’s boy.  But, if that was so, then why did she treat him so coldly, she sure didn’t like her husband, Peter III.  Anyway, ancient history, here he was, suddenly autocrat of all the Russias.  He was, it seems, a bit like his father.  Odd duck.
Catherine had comprehensively prepared Paul to not be the emperor but Catherine collapsed and departed within a day and whatever convoluted succession plan she had was not in place, so it was that a guy whose idea of fun was drilling a pet regiment that his mother had given him, who accused, it is said, his wife (arranged marriage of course)  of putting ground glass in his food, who loved to read tales of chivalry, came to the throne.   There was war going on, financial problems, intrigue and conspiracy, and a cancerous social structure of nobles and serfs, more or less the same as had in France produced that damnable offense against Heaven: the Republic.  They knew it was a problem, even the nobles who benefited most from the system, but they weren’t going to do anything about it now, with fighting going on.
Paul governed with comprehensive impulsivity and weirdness.  He fought against  France until 1798 but later got mad at erstwhile ally Britain and quit.  He, how can I put this delicately, banned long pants, every guy had to wear knickers, police to enforce with force like the Taliban.
More than anything else he was just plain irritating to a lot of people.  Conspiracies began to coalesce, one of them carried through one night, evidently after some serious drinking by the conspirators.  What kind of funny farm was the palace at that time anyway?
Have to discuss the coins.  All of the Pauline coins are of similar types.  The copper has a cursive crowned “P” while the silver and gold have crosses made out of “P”s.  There are some trial portraits, but nothing for circulation.  Two “trade coins.”  The motto on the reverse of the silver coins means “Not to us, not to us, but to your name” referring to God.
Copper denominations are polushka, denga, kopek and 2 kopeks.  Polushkas are kind of hard to find, the others show up in dealer boxes in grades ranging from XF on down.  Planchet  are normal.  EM mint is most common, then AM and KM, and there is a scarcer no mintmark variety.  I have seen fakes of the common EM 2 kopeks.  There was a while when they were faking everything.
Silver coin denominations were 5 and 10 kopeks, quarter, half and full ruble.  Right now I think its reasonable to designate all of them as rare in any grade, though as recently as 2 years ago that was not the case.  Gold 5 and 10 rubles are rare.
The “trade” coins were the gold ducat and the overweight silver “Albertus” ruble.  Ducats in the Russian context were essentially proclamation pieces.  International trade was done in Dutch ducats in north and central Europe at that time but everyone who had the right and the wherewithal would make few just for me-too.  That’s what the Russian ducats were.
The Albertus ruble was another of Paul’s flights of fancy.  Conceive if you will a conception of nobility that encompasses the weight of the coinage.  Imagine the splendid nobility of the full size thalers of yore, the grace, the glory.  Then compare with the debased and shrunken ruble, cruelly ravaged by that mother or his.  Russia could lead the world in a wholehearted return to the truer values of the past.
But they were having a war, they couldn’t afford it.  There are a few 1796 Albertus rubles and 1797 “heavy” rubles and about a zillion fakes.  They should be at least 4 figures, usually 5.   If you’re interested in this level of coin you will of course know what you’re doing.

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RUSSIA - part 16

Alexander I of Russia.  What melodrama is Russian imperial history!  His father Paul yet another ruler assassinated.  The son supposedly somehow in cahoots with the conspiracy but, they say, he begged, no, ordered them not to kill his dad, but they did anyway, and from then on there was this tear in his soul that never healed.
He was in his way very like the father he disdained, notwithstanding his grandmother, the Great Catherine, having confided (perhaps falsely) that father’s bastardy, took him away from poor Paul, apparently to groom as her heir.  Alas for Catherine’s plan, if she indeed had it, death came to her unheralded, one day a coma, next day gone.  Not-quite-all-there Paul came to the throne.  A decade of policy consisting of bureaucratic tunnel vision on the one hand and wild wisps of dreamy pie in the sky nonsense in a time of constant war.  Paul assassinated in the time of Napoleon.
We don’t pay enough attention to these conquering hero dictator kinds of guys even though they come up fairly frequently in human history.  They study their for forerunner’s lives and actions from Ramses of Egypt through Alexander and Caesar to Chingis and Tamerlane and Napoleon and Hitler, hoping someday to emulate.  When fate smiles upon that type everything changes afterward.
The Russian money and power of the time, watching Napoleon and watching Paul, and watching most of all their family interests, schemed and eventually something emerged and a pack of drunken palace louts, so it was said, were given the proper promises by whoever it was that gave them, broke into his apartment in the Palace and put him down.
I wonder whatever happened to those particular drunken louts?  The normal procedure in high political murders is for the tools to be destroyed lest they brag drunkenly at some future date and perhaps mention some name.
Alexander, emperor in 1801at the only technically adult age of 24 (my older son 23 at the moment, my own experience and that of everyone I know – I shudder to imagine being ruled by a 24 year old, still imagining that the truth can be known, that good intentions count, that justice is obvious, that happily can somehow be ever after.)  Napoleon, age 32, his only remaining illusion that fate might be smiling upon him, advancing toward the zenith of his wild career.
When Napoleon was working for the revolutionary French government he represented for the crowned heads of the rest of Europe the class struggle that they had been routinely suppressing since the uncounted peasant and slave revolts of all human history.  When he got himself in 1804 crowned emperor by the pope (“Hey, what’s going on!” cried the “real” emperor of Austria, theoretically there’s supposed to be only one emperor at a time) the threat didn’t change but they realized they were looking at a wannabe, not the end of the world as they knew it.
They still had to defeat the dude, he being an aggressive menace and all.  Russia, from its official policy to the bottom of its soul so to speak, thought of itself as the strong right arm of traditional legitimacy in Europe, the guardian of the divinely ordained guardians of the nations.  Russia was ready always to tromp around in foreign lands and kill foreign people in defense of that divinely inspired mode of government – the absolute monarchy.  On that point the three successive monarchs with their tabloid family relations agreed without reservation.  Monarchy was divine and would be defended with blood.  Russian blood, wherever needed.
Alexander, paradoxically, like his grandmother, had been raised in the presence of the egalitarian ideas of the 18th century “enlightenment,” those very ideas that had crystallized in the American and French revolutions, the anti-slavery movement, etc.  Grandmother and grandson both thought the “brotherhood of man” was a noble and good idea but neither let those warm and fuzzy sentiments get in the way of the conduct of government.  They oppressed their oppressible subjects, peasants, serfs, etc., corruptly accommodated their stronger subjects to obtain their ends, increased their power in whatever ways were available.
Alexander was very young and idealistic, full of “If only we all just did this or that everything would be fine,” getting snitty when his fuddy-duddy old ministers turned out to be right when they told him whatever it was didn’t work.  Alexander got a group of his buddies, all more or less his age, as his non-standard privy council, maybe analogous to FDR’s kitchen cabinet, to hatch a constitution, “fix” the serf problem, and other basic issues of the time.  All liberal and idealistic, Alexander decreed freedom of the press, abolition of torture in legal investigations, other “progressive” stuff like that.  The liberal stuff was met with foot dragging and incomprehension by both populace and bureaucracy and results were minor.  The liberality went much further in the non-Russian western zones such as Poland, where things opened up enough that people started thinking nationalistic independence types of thoughts that would flower in bloody uprisings later.
Every approach toward the people’s freedom being productive of potentially anti-monarchic sentiment, more or less all of Alexander’s liberal reforms were first hemmed in, then modified into status quo conservatism if not completely rescinded.  And there was, to boot, something of the same kind of personalized flighty inconstancy in policy that Paul so dramatically displayed.  The emperor would change his mind and the whole country would have to change with him.
Who knows, he might have lost the country to some faction or other, or even one of the many local revolts could have grown into some Russian version of the French revolution had there not been that overwhelming foreign threat, Napoleon.
Paul had been battling the French until 1801 when, apparently for personal reasons, he left the anti-French coalition and became neutral.  Alexander went a bit further in that direction with an actual Anglo-Russian treaty but reversed Paul’s estrangement with Austria and Prussia.  Friendly all over the place, he began talking with France itself.  A peace treaty resulted.  Many expressions of personal friendship and admiration ensued.
Napoleon, however, was all strategy, including the friendly noises made toward Russia.  He did what he did, much of it detrimental to to Russia, Alexander would complain, more soothing noises from Napoleon.  The peace stuff of 1801 lasted until about 1802 or so, when Britain and France began to get ready for the next war which came in 1805, Russia opposed to France.  Diplomacy between France and Russia had ceased the previous year over a French political execution of a French noble known to Alexander.
Napoleon won the 1805-07 hostilities.  The ensuing treaty negotiations included a veritable blizzard of blandishments by Napoleon, personally, toward Alexander, personally.  The personal embodiment of Russia found himself impressed.  But he was unable for personal reasons to bring himself to abandon his erstwhile allies Austria and Prussia.  Napoleon kept trying but there was that solid core of Alexander that could be described as incorruptible.  In the end he would not sell out his ideals, such as they were, nor would be betray what he saw as the interests of his country, nor would he play sidekick.  So Franco-Russian relations deteriorated, despite a joint Franco-Russian war against Austria in 1809, until Napoleon finally invaded Russia in 1812 and that was the beginning of the end of Napoleon.
Skip to 1815, Napoleon was through, there are conferences amongst the victors to try to figure out what to do.  Alexander promoted his idealistic ideas.  The dominant line at the time was fronted by the Austrian Minister of State Metternich, who put together a legitimist coalition that settled core European questions like Poland and Germany for a couple of decades, more peace than Europe had ever seen before.
Metternich seems to have thought of himself as a democrat but he served an absolutist emperor with loyalty and genius.  He had no use for the brotherhood of man idealism of Alexander.  Alexander, for his part, found himself eventually brought around to something approaching Metternich’s view that national interests always trump personals and that “people” are at the service of the state, not the other way round as we are supposed to be doing here.
That was all in his mind however, that liberal mush.  He had never governed the least little bit “popularly,” but willfully as he pleased in the traditional Romanov manner.  Whatever he did was the right thing because he was the divinely sanctioned emperor.  His internal policy was harshly applied in that classic Russian whips and gibbets style that the rest of the world periodically deplores.  Lots of corruption as usual.  Riots and uprisings all over the place.  Discontent everywhere.  The army of course has to be unfairly favored in such political circumstances but he also annoyed the brass by experimenting with what he called military settlements, essentially slave labor agricultural operations with the peasants also having military obligations.  Cradle to grave hereditary obligatory service.  Slavery, right?  It turned out they couldn’t pay for themselves and they bred many, not a few rebellions that had to be put down at cost but did Alexander stop?  No.  He would pave the road to Petersburg with the bones of rebels, the military settlements would continue.  Russia in Alexander’s time spent plenty of money on internal security operations.
Alexander’s last chapter was the Greek insurrection starting 1821.  He thought he should be with the Greeks, fellow Orthodox and all, but he had treaty obligations that demanded he be with the Ottomans.  He painfully did his duty until 1825 when he left for the south on a “vacation” with his ailing wife.  Everyone thought he would gather an army and invade Turkey on behalf of Greece but instead it was put out that he died, age 48.  In yet more Russian melodrama rumors immediately began to circulate that he had actually abdicated and disappeared to live as a solitary hermit in Siberia.  When the Bolsheviks opened his tomb in 1925 no body was found.  You can’t make this stuff up.  Reality really is stranger than fiction.
A unique feature of Alexander’s Russian coinage is that they do not refer to him personally in any way.  You have to go to Poland to see a portrait of him.  Look at the ruble: Paul’s has a bunch of Ps and an invocation of God, Alexander’s says “Russian Government.”  On the copper just the denomination.  Could that possibly be some liberal servant-of-the-people thought expressed in that absence?  There are numerous portrait patterns.  Curious.
The coinage began as a continuation of 18th century modules though the designs were all completely new.  The old machinery was still in use so the coins have that those loose-collared spread out 18th century looking planchets.  New machinery began to be used with the 1807 rubles and generally from 1810, making modern looking coins with squared off edges to the planchets, flat surfaces, gridded artwork for enhanced symmetry.  Mint records, which had been pretty good since the mid-18th century, became even more reliable.
Old style coinage included copper polushkas (quarter kopeks), rare and beware of modern counterfeits, dengas (half kopeks) and kopeks similarly, 2 kopeks not rare but these days not easy to find, and 5 kopeks similar and with an added popularity factor because they’re big and tend to be nicely made.  Copper mints were Ekaterinburg (EM) and KM mark confusingly used sometimes at Kolyvan/Suzun and elsewhen at Kolpino.  Old style silver consisted of 10 kopeks, polupoltinniks (quarter rubles), poltinas (half rubles) and rubles.  They’re all very hard to find now, rarity only a matter of degree.  And the gold 5 and 10 rubles are very rare or very very rare.
New style coinage put the copper at 2/3 of the old weights, the weights and bullion content of gold and silver were unchanged.  Of new style coppers many of the 2 kopeks are very common, kopeks and dengas much less so, no polushkas or copper 5 kopeks made.  Copper mints were Ekaterinburg (most common), Izhora (IM, except 1810 when KM was used with MK mintmaster initials), Kolyvan/Suzun (the rest of the KM coins), and Saint Petersburg (SPB).
New style silver coins were 5, 10, and 20 kopeks, poltinas and rubles.  These, in general, were not too hard to find maybe 10 years ago, grades low to reasonable to excellent at reasonable prices.  Now all gone.  I have one left, an apparently unpublished overdate that I seem to want too much for.  They’re not really rare, Alexandrine silvers, only functionally rare.  Demand hopelessly exceeds supply.
Gold is 5 rubles denomination only and rare.  Prices are high.
The Napoleonic period has left a number of military counterfeits and counterfeit Turkish coins are the Russian contribution.  The coins were made at St. Petersburg, writes Uzdenikov, 1808-9, a number of different years and types of Turkish 1 kurush coins.  Some of them can be distinguished from genuine by the standardized lack of some diacritical marks and a characteristic misspelling of the mint name, others are correct but for different treatment of the design elements.  As far as I can recall I’ve never seen one.
And the manufacture of fake Dutch ducats, which had been going on big time since the 18th century, continued.
I don’t think I’ve written about the fake Dutch ducats, have I?  Dutch ducats were like hundred dollar bills today, nobody had to ask “What’s this?”  It was just much more convenient, when going abroad, to carry Dutch ducats than local money.  Government operatives like ambassadors would go out of country and spend these Dutch ducats, they were good gold and spent by someone with diplomatic immunity, what were they going to do?  The Dutch complained of course, but they also didn’t let it get in the way of business.  This went on until the mid-19th century.  You can find references and websites that explain the micro-differences in the Russian versions.  I believe I’ve seen one or more offered in some auction.

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RUSSIA - part 17

 Let's see, from the time of Alexei Feodorovich Romanov in the 17th century I think every sucession of a new monarch was some kind of problem involving conspiracy and violence.  The death or "death" of Alexander I continued the grand operatic tradition.  Alexander wanted so badly to help the Greeks get free from the Ottoman Turks, he went down south, it was announced that he was accompanying he ailing wife to take the airs, people imagined that he would raise an army to invade Turkey in aid of the Greeks, instead it is put out that he died of fever.  It was immediately rumored that he had actually abdicated and become a hermit monk.
 I have to keep reminding myself that there were no newspapers back then in Russia.  Word of mouth, private courier.  The average person knew nothing about anything for their entire life.  No invasion of Turkey happened.  The fact that Alexander's tomb was later found to be empty proves nothing I suppose.  If it was an abdication it turned out pretty messy.  There was no document.  Blood, as usual in Russian successions, was shed.
 It took x days for a rider to get back to Saint Petersburg with the news: Alexander dead in the town of Taganrog, November 19 old style calendar, December 1 new style.  There were no (legitimate) children so next in line for the throne was assumed to be Alexander's next younger brother Constantine.  Nobody outside of the family knew that Constantine had renounced his succession rights on the occasion of his second marriage to a Polish lady.  He was all wrapped up in a love-hate relationship with Poland and did not want to leave.  Very complex guy, Constantine, very military all his life, pretty much not officer material but thanks to his birth always in charge of big things, like Poland.
 So, because only the family knew of Constantine's recusal, and not even all of them, the populace of St. Petersburg, including the guard, the army, and even younger brother Nicholas, publicly swore allegiance.  Another few days for the riders to get to Poland to tell Constantine, few more to get back with his thanks-but-no-thanks.  Then Nicholas came forward to take the oaths of the people, December 14 old style.
 There is that numismatic relic of Constantine's non-accession - the portrait pattern ruble in several iterations.  Many words have been written about the Constantine rubles over the years.  They were made at the mint, probably 1826 or so, only a few.  Constantine has been a popular figure in Russia, where he has been thought to be a romantic liberal (while in Poland he is considered a ruthless tyrant).  I think there are a "few" "original" strikes and some more later "novodel" restrikes.  A few years back one of the originals was purchased at auction by an unknown person in Russia for what seemed at the time to be an enormous 5-figure sum.  Must be well along into the 6-figure zone by now.
 The situation still was not complicated enough for Russian history, there had to be an armed uprising too.  A group of nobles in the Imperial Guard had formed a liberal advocacy group in 1816, while liberalism was, at least in theory, part of the government's program.  It is written that emperor Alexander knew about them but did not interfere, commenting that they reminded him of his idealistic youth.  The group became more radical over time, until a mutiny in which they had a hand in 1820 demanded a crackdown.  The group got quiet but did not go away.
 In the succession crisis of 1825 some of these liberals saw a chance for something, though I have to admit that I can't see it.  The guard had sworn for Constantine, when the call came to switch to Nicholas some of them refused.  Liberal officers got about 3000 guards to stand in Senate Square and proclaim again for "Constantine and Constitution" meaning some version of the Polish constitution, there being no Russian constitution at the time.  But no one else joined them, so they stood there in the icy square, soon to be surrounded by 9000 troops loyal to Nicholas.  Talks were held, the rebels shot a few people, Nicholas ordered a cavalry charge which failed because of ice, finally he had cannon brought in and shelled them.  The rebels fled to the ice on the Neva River, artillery was used again, there was a great slaughter.  The liberals became known as Decembrists.  Nicholas had five leaders tried and hanged, many others sent to Siberian exile.  Very romantic, apparently hopeless, but their memory lived on and they were called forerunners of the Revolution later.
 In the aftermath Nicholas established a commission to look into what made the Decembrists tick.  The report pointed to the need for reform in all sorts of areas, serfdom especially, education, military affairs, law, you name it.  The Russian laws were still not completely codified, meaning, you know, people could just make things up and if they were sufficiently well placed they could get away with it.  So they did some of the easy stuff, like actually writing down the laws in one place, and fiddlefaddled about the hard stuff like the serfs.
 Nicholas didn't believe in all that liberal claptrap.  He liked to censor, prescribe, proscribe, forbid, command.  As people were evidently beginning to think more in his 19th century he was all about telling them exactly what to think and not think.  He set up what we have come to call, generically, the "secret police," that being a network of uniformed and ununiformed internal spies and armed agents dedicated to enforcing loyalty.  There was also a healthy dose of ethnic prejudice going on as often occurs in police state situations.  Russians good, everyone else suspect.
 In Poland his repressions sparked a rebellion in 1831, which he crushed with joyous vigor, abolishing thereafter the Congress Kingdom and reducing Poland to a province.  He had some more fun in 1848, when he joyously crushed the Hungarian rebels.
 Then he got in trouble.  He had fought a war with the Turks early in his reign, but an opportunity arose a few years later to aid the legitimate Ottomans against upstart Egyptian dictator Muhammad Ali.  In the event, the Egyptian pretty much won, and Russia came away with a treaty of mutual defense with the Ottomans.
 Britain and France didn't like that treaty.  They thought it might give Russian ships privileged access to the Dardanelles, a matter of some interest because, for example, Britain and Russia had tangled over Malta and other Mediterranean real estate during the Napoleonic unpleasantness.  Britain hosted a conference of all the "important" European nations which in 1841 declared the Dardanelles closed to all non-Ottoman warships.  That was a major hit for Russia, which thereafter had no access to the Mediterranean.
 Russia's justification for Mediterranean access was protection of the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, and they had a couple of 18th century treaties granting them various powers in places of interest like Bethlehem and Jerusalem, not to mention all of what would one day become Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia.
 Well, Napoleon III came to power in France and immediately pushed the Ottomans to dump Orthodox Russia as protector of Christians and to take up with Catholic France.
 Nicholas was not going to take it lying down.  He diplomatized all over the place, especially toward Britain, meanwhile building up his military in the south, a high level negotiation with the Turks coming to nothing much in a hurry.  The British gambit failed, Nicholas marched into modern Romania, intent on annexation of that largely orthodox region.  Britain was displeased, sent a fleet to the Dardanelles, where it met up with a French fleet and they prepared to violate Ottoman territory together.  A proposal for a compromise was made, accepted by Russia, rejected by the Ottomans, who declared war on Russia in 1853.  Some military shillyshally ensued until one day some Russian ships destroyed some Turkish ships in harbor at the Black Sea port of Sinop.  Claiming that violated existing treaties, France and Britain declared war on Russia and sailed through the Dardanelles.
 They were really interested in keeping Russia from taking over, as they saw it, everything.  You're in the British Foreign Office, there's a globe, you're looking at India and there's Russia over there, British Columbia, there's Russian Alaska, they're right there in Iran, they're at the Chinese border, watching the opium and the silver trade, it looks like they're expanding in all directions.
 Russia found itself completely isolated in this conflict that we call the Crimean War.  It showed the Russian military to be substantially obsolete, its economy shaky, and then Nicholas got sick and died in the middle of the war, leaving his son Alexander to pick up the pieces.  It is reported that he apologized to Alexander for the mess he was leaving.  Wikipedia quotes one of his employees: "The main failing of the reign of Nicholas Pavlovich was that it was all a mistake".[
 Nicholas' coins follow the some of the precedents of his father but as time went on some innovations were introduced.  There were no portraits on the circulating coinage, an Alexandrine habit, and "3" was introduced as a multiple for both kopeks and rubles, an innovation.  Then of course there are the platinum coins.
 But let's start with the copper.  Looking at the fabric of the coins we see that they put in new machinery for the 1840 coinage.  The new coins are distinguished by differences in weight, size, and design, and another change in 1850 reduced the size further.  The weight data for the Nicholas copper as presented in the Standard Catalog is therefore all wrong.  Examples: I have a 1/2 kopek 1841, SCWC gives weight as 4 grams, mine is 5.1 grams, another of 1852, still 4 grams by SCWC, mine is 3.4 grams, and so forth.
 At any rate, the first "Alexandrine" copper type had half, 1 and 2 kopek denominations, variously with EM, KM, IM, and SPB mintmarks.  Scarcity models that of the actual Alexanders: 2 kopek least uncommon, half kopeks quite hard to find.  Overall, the Nicholas issues are scarcer than the Alexanders.
 The second copper type introduced the wings-down eagle type, rather handsome in my opinion, though crude planchets are normal for the series, and for grade bugs you need to be careful that the St. George on the shield is struck up on your otherwise XF coin.  I would lower by at least a grade for weak GeorgeWings-down eagle appears on clunky 5 kopek coppers last issued in 1810, and copper 10 kopeks not tried since 1762.  Mints are EM, CM (Suzun, previously KM), and SPB.  EM would be most common, but everything is scarce these days.
 The third copper module has crowned letter "N" (Cyrillic "H") in a beaded border, dates in the 1840s, denominations are 1/4, 1/2, 1, 2, and novelty 3 kopeks, mints are EM, SPM, CM, and MW for Warsaw in recently annexed Poland.  There are some extremely common dates in this series: 1840-EM 1 kopek for example, which means today that you might run into one every now and then.  Amazingly, I think, there was a time in the late 1990s when people were making counterfeits of these very common coins.  I tell Russians about this and none of them believe me, too cheap, they opine.  But I saw several of them.  You know what you think you know, I know what I think I know.
 The final Nicholas I copper issue began in 1850.  Smaller and neater coins, no beads around the edge.  Mints are EM and BM for Warsaw.  BM coins are lower mintages and twice the demand because Polish collectors want them too, so, scarce.  Denominations are polushka (1/4 kopeck), denezhka ("little 1/2 kopek"), 1, 2, 3, and 5 kopeks.  Little ones have crowned "N," 2 kopeks and higher have a "wings-up" eagle.  If they are worn enough it gets hard to tell which mint it is.
 Silver has that same old machinery/new machinery thing as the copper, the changeover in 1831.  The 1826 coinage has old style "wings-up" eagle and new-style "wings-down" eagle varieties.  Circulating denominations are 5, 10, 20, 25, 50 kopeks and ruble, a few struck in Warsaw (MW).  I've had, relatively speaking, plenty of these Nicholas I silvers in grades up to superb, back in the pre-now period, when everything is bought and tucked away and you have to wait until someone dies and then its in Russia anyway so forget it.  Uncirculated rubles I had.
 I even had one of the commemorative rubles - innovation of the reign.  There were two types of rubles, 1834 with the Alexander column, 1839 with the Borodino column.  I had the Borodino of course.  Good old days.
 You see in the Standard Catalog several 1.5 ruble "family" coins and a note about another "ruble" considered to be a medal, but you have these odd denominations that make sense only in Poland, teeny mintages, c all them whatever you want, I guess, they are so rare.  Similar large coins with Borodino monument theoretically more available, but do not hold your breath.
 Gold is only the 5 ruble denomination, some from Warsawm there are 3 successive types and a special issue of gold from the Kolyvan mines.  The Kolyvan, mintage 1000, is truly rare, so are the Warsaw coins, the other "common" ones are merely unavailable.
 And now about the platinum coins.  Native platinum was found in the Urals from the start of the 19th century in connection with gold mining, a state monopoly industry.  The platinum was sent back to St. Petersburg with the gold and began to accumulate.  At some point the suggestion was made to strike coins.  It was difficult.  They couldn't even smelt it properly, couldn't attain melting temperature at that time, so they couldn't make normal blanks.  They sort of half annealed granules and them compressed the resulting sponge to form the planchets.  You can see the structure with a microscope and it will distinguish the originals from later restrikes, novodels, and fakes.
 I have bought and sold precisely 3 3 rubles coins and 1 6 ruble.  None of them were what could be called "nice."  They evidently did circulate, a lot of them were cleaned at some point, and I've run across several that were deliberately damaged in various non-jewelry ways, as if some people back when had nothing better to do than scratch up platinum coins.
 A final innovation - proofs started being made, and I have proved to my satisfaction that they exist.

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RUSSIA - part 18

 There's something about those Russian coins that induces a form of mania to those whose thing it is.  They are like class A objects of desire.  All of you know what I mean, whatever your class A happens to be.  But the Russians, the coins that is, are a separate class of items that inspire a different and very characteristic approach to the coins.  There is, dare I say, some level of reverence amongst the devotees.  There is, perhaps reverence is the right word, amongst the Russian numismatists.    The coins are like the best part of the Russian Empire experience, the rest of it - study of the history is perhaps productive of dementia.  It is just too weird.
 Literacy was maybe 10-15% in Alexander's time, maybe 20 million serfs, life was lived on a rather low level by most people.  The Crimean war had demonstrated the superior efficiency of western armies, that prowess reflecting the enhanced vigor of the societies of the west.  They did things better.  Why?  Industry.  What do industrial workers need?  Education.  When people get educated what do they start to do?  Think.
 The reign of Nicholas I had been devoted to keeping people from thinking any thoughts other than what they had been told to think.  That was the Russian way, always had been.  But that kind of situation did not produce innovation at a rate to match, say, the countries that had just beaten them in Crimea.  It didn't work, it never works, just makes everyone unhappy, then as soon as that situation changes all of a sudden people start thinking again.
 Except that the serfs and the free peasants on the bottom didn't think those thoughts by and large.  They would grumble about conditions, if they got too bad they'd rebel in a more or less traditionally disorderly manner, they'd be repressed, history would drag on.  Dirt and malnutrition.  Not much in the way of ideology.  That was the domain of the intelligentsia - the people who had been sent to school to help support the state.  Remember Peter the Great had started that initiative of forced education.  You, over there, go to this school and become an engineer.  Hup!
 Probably if it was efficient we'd still be doing slavery, but it wasn't.  Machinery was better, which required educated workers, etc.  The Crimean war could be said to have demonstrated that using people as draft animals was not winning any wars.  Something had to be done.
 So intellectuals would think and talk and come up with stuff to, for instance, improve the lot of the downtrodden peasants, and the peasants, the free ones, they discovered over and over, were not particularly interested.  They were astonishingly, continuously, exclusively individualistic.  Give them their way all they ever wanted to do was buy their neighbors' land and the neighbor could go jump in that freezing lake over there.  99% non-communitarian if you gave them the chance.  And the serfs.  How did serfdom start anyway?  A lord said to a bunch of peasants "Work for me and I will protect you from the barbarians."  Time passed, the lords figured out ways to get more out of them.  Eventually, 18th century, they stopped pretending and just bought and sold them like, no, as slaves.
 What to do?  Over decades in the 19th century various intellectual theories were formulated and schematized, action groups forming to advance the theories, some going violent on occasion, all on behalf of the downtrodden, who, by and large, could not be brought into the "movement" by the theorizers.
 The theorizers ranged from the people who eventually became the Communists to the people who came to be called, generically, Slavophile nationalists.  In the whole spectrum of these utopian theorizers there was a sort of Russian flavor, it being Russia after all.  Dare I characterize that flavor?  Perhaps the deep velvety tones of messianic and millennarianistic Third-Rome Slavicism, the sharply sentimental glorification of the deprivation and squalor of peasant life as a spiritual pinnacle of human society, the earthy assumption that there was a right way, whatever it happened to be, that brooked no argument.  It is a commonplace of discussions of this subject - the Russian political soul, that they have had in their millennium very little experience of democracy, which is people arguing and then agreeing on what to do, and extremely much experience with dictatorship.  So they have done democracy clumsily and ineptly and they have done dictatorship well.
 In political methodology there was also a spectrum of opinion ranging from pacifist non-violent education all the way to crime-sabotage-violence.  The police were constantly going at the violents and frequently at thinkers in general, but the violents stayed busy, the right wing Slavists, etc. frequently indulging in ethnic slaughter festivals, the left wing anarchists and socialists going after government officials, both enthusiatically waging class warfare on behalf of "the people."
 You teach people how to think they're going to think, talk with other people who think, eventually they're going to think something you don't want them to think, if you happened to be the Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias, the guy who issued the thinking licenses.
 That was Nicholas.  Alexander II was his son.  He was not a chip off the old block.  He wanted to open things up.  His generals told him he had to.  And they had to get some industry going, so they had to change the business situation so they could get some private enterprise going, build the factories to make the stuff.  The factories needed workers, that was going to be the serfs they were going to free.
 The big problem with freeing the serfs was that a class of landowners were making a living from their forced labor and those owners had to be dealt with some way, they couldn't just be ordered to set their workers free.
 The subject had been under consideration for more than 100 years, got batted around for a few more and then finally a scheme was worked out and launched in 1861, Alexander noticing what was going on in the United States, then both Lincoln and Jefferson Davis noticing what had transpired in Russia.
 The deal formally freed the serfs from hereditary obligations to their former lords and gave them some land, but there were provisos.  The newly emancipated peasants were lumped into "communes," they still couldn't own the land, there were local governing bodies they could participate in but couldn't control, and the communes had to make payments to the former landowners for the land, the schedule ran on for decades.  So they ended up about 63.5% free, they never got the best land, a lot of them couldn't make a go of it and drifted to the towns to work in the new factories.  Very mixed bag, emancipation.  Grumbling did not cease.
 Other events of Alexander's time: lots of administrative reorganizations and reforms, liberalized economics, an uprising in Poland, after which it was made illegal to speak Polish outside of Poland proper, quite a bit of autonomy for Finland, and then he was assassinated by some left crazies who called themselves "The Will of the People."  1881.  No external military ventures in his time.  He had just signed the papers on a constitution.  His son tore them up as his first act of rule.
 I kind of think that there were a lot of places in the Russian empire of the mid-19th century where coins did not circulate.  You look at the mintage figures, not so high, look at the relative commonness in the market of the 1990s - now there's hardly anything on the market, a fair number of people were keeping jars of coins in Russia through the 19th and early 20th centuries.  I find myself thinking: out in the sticks, hunting, a coin comes your way every now and then, you keep it for when you need it.  The rest of the time you trade your furs for your tea and sugar and bullets.
 We may as well also keep in mind that there were collectors of Russian coins back then, saving stuff exactly the way we do.  It being a society totally dedicated to corrupt and discriminatory social practice, people with clout and access could get stuff out of the mint, thus the occasional hyper-rare regular coins that perhaps a few extra got made for bigshot collectors and the odd pieces of odd stuff, patterns, novodels, proofs, whatever.
 Recall please that Nicholas had taken references to his personal self off all of the coins but the smaller copper so for Alexander, who had not been expecting to ascend at quite that time, and in the midst of a losing war, it was convenient to just let the mint continue, same types, everything, with due regard for the new imperial initial on the polushka, etc.  More pressing concerns.
 A new generation of machinery was installed for the silver and gold in 1859.  The copper got a slimdown and makeover in 1867.  In the "advanced" countries of the time everyone was experimenting with copper-nickel and there are some trials and patterns from Russia, some with Alexander's portrait.  If one of these shows up it will be in an auction and it will sell for too much.
 There are proofs, I have seen some.
 As for availability, all of the copper and silver types used to be mildly common for the Alexander years - 1856-81.  There were rare dates of course, and the Warsaw coins were always tougher than the other mints, but there was traffic in those coins up to the ruble, high grades not impossible.  1877 ruble was especially common.  Gold not common but one could expect reasonable price.  There was a commemorative ruble for the Nicholas monument, 1859, used to be you might bump into it on occasion.  Ah, the good old days.  Now everything is unavailable and would be too expensive if it were.  The only way to keep things in stock is to charge 3x as much as you think its worth and sometimes that doesn't work either and the coin goes flying away leaving you with only some money in your hand.

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RUSSIA - part 19

 One more Russian emperor ascended as a result of violence in 1881, that would be Alexander III.  His father was assassinated by a nihilist group.  Who were the nihilists?  They felt/thought that the way humans were organized to be under the control of someone was basically wrong and obviously didn't work very well.  What to do instead?  All sorts of possibilities presented once one adopted a position of questioning "everything."  The thought form spread in many directions.  Two in particular had legs, as it were.  One was a people's education movement so to speak, with people who knew "things" going to the ignorant downtrodden to teach.  Such activities were of course not approved by authorities, people doing things because they wanted to.  No good.  Government sent spies and repressed, even under relatively liberal Alexander II.
 Another set of nihilist thinkers got into the mindset that they preferred to try to actively destroy the existing order, and they began assassinating government officials.  One of them eventually got to tsar liberator Alexander II on the very day that he had signed an order to create consultative councils to work toward a constitution.  Russian history: no opera can beat it for drama.
 The new emperor was very easy to characterize.  He was a reactionary, autocratic slavophile.  If you had asked him personally he would have no doubt agreed that he was.  He had been raised and trained that way, the world view suited him.  He immediately cancelled his father's decree on councils and  proceeded for the entirety of his reign to repress everything and everyone who was not exactly in accord with his thoughts.  Those thoughts tended toward a vision of Russia where everyone was Russian and they all obeyed him.  It was all very simple, the creed of his forefathers.  Everyone had to go to Russian schools and learn Russian, the better to understand him when he told them what to do.  Russians were treated better than any other kinds of people, or rather all of the others were treated worse, especially Jews.
 Who might be a 20th century analog?  Maybe Stroessner of Paraguay.  Very very conservative.  Everybody shut up and get back to work.
 People from the same group that had assassinated his father tried to get him but failed.  Police grabbed a bunch of them, they were tried and executed.  One of the executed people was the older brother of the guy who later became known as Lenin.
 On the other hand, he did some administrative reform, supported growth of industry and capital formation, built the trans-Siberian railway, stayed out of foreign wars.  Russian economy grew.
 Alexander III allowed the coinage styles to continue as they were in the time of his father.  The fractional coppers with the imperial initial were changed from A-II to A-III.  The types of the kopek and multiples up to the silver ruble and the gold 3 and 5 rubles were unchanged.  In 1886 a new portrait type was introduced for the major silver (25 kopeks and up) and gold, including a 10 rubles denomination not issued Since 1805.  One would find, in living memory, those gold and silver portrait coins from time to time.  100 Nicholas II rubles, one Alexander III.  Now they go to auction and get surprising prices.  His one commemorative was the coronation ruble of 1883.  Everybody wants one.
 Alexander III was a big, bear-looking guy.  Riding on a train one day in 1888 there occurred a big accident, the car he was riding in collapsed.  The emperor personally held up the collapsed roof of the car so other people could get out.  He was injured, doctors later blamed the kidney disease that killed him 6 years later on the injuries sustained on that day.  In light of modern medical knowledge that connection may be tenuous.
 Nicholas II, last emperor, 1894-1917, oldest son of Alexander III.  Father died somewhat unexpectedly at age 49, the preparation of the heir not completed, one supposes it never is.  There are stories told to explain a curious diffident and vacillatory tone in the conduct of his reign.  My favorite has young Nicholas, skinny and weak, jealous of his father's ability to lift a large stone.  If the 6'4" Alexander was his son's unattainable ideal of manliness, we can draw a picture of a guy coming to power without proper training and with an inferiority complex.  People commonly compare him with Dad, his father would have done this or not done that.  Abdicate, for instance.  With Alexander, they would say, the subject would never have been raised.
 There was a bad beginning to his reign.  The coronation was in 1896, 2 years after his accession.  "The people" were invited to a festival at a field in Moscow where they were to get free food and drink.  Tens or hundreds of thousands of people showed up.  At a certain point a rumor began that supplies were insufficient and a stampede began to get to the stuff.  More than 1000 people were trampled to death.  That was a bad sign for a superstitious people.  Nicholas made it worse by going through with the fancy ball for the titles that evening.  He evidently thought that going on would show his steely resolve.  People were not understanding.  His father, they said, would have cancelled the festivities and declared a period of national mourning.  Maybe or maybe not, but they thought that thought.
 Nicholas continued to misapply his energies and enthusiasms throughout his reign.  He continued the social repressions and the economic development policies of his father.  Specially arranged slaughterfests of Jews (and occasionally other ethnics, Chinese for example) on the one hand, going on the European gold standard on the other.
 That gold standard made Russia in a sense one of the "great nations."  They had been building a national gold reserve since the 1880s, so this, like most of the things Nicholas did, was Alexander's idea.  The portrait gold from 1886 was designed with European artistic norms in mind.
 Then he really underestimated the Japanese.  And really overestimated Russian military capability, and didn't even think about the cost of running that war.  The loss of the fleet at the end of a round-the-world journey was terrible, the fact that the longest supply line in the world was a single track railroad with a gap in the middle at Lake Baikal was the thing that made the war unwinnable at that moment.  At least 3 years to fix that tremendous national inconvenience.  Japanese won the 1905 war fair and square.
 Nicholas didn't know what to do, and drift produced disorder.  Anti-government types, organized and underground for most of a century, all of them "leftwing" as the term was used then, emerged to try to influence events.  Military units started to mutiny.  There was significant death.  Suggestions were made by close associates of the emperor, who in due course found himself forced to call for an assembly of representatives.
 He, in his reactionary heart, heard himself announce an advisory body.  The representatives, when gathered, thought of themselves as a legislature.  The two views fought it out for the next several years, the emperor with his autocratic powers, military and policy capabilities, and sponsored pro-government representatives, the anti-government representatives with nothing much.
 Let's not deal with World War I for now and go on to the coins.  The 1894 Nicholas 1/4 kopek is quite rare.  The rest of the minor coins used to be more or less findable except for the 2 moneyer years like the 1912 & 1913 silver, and in each case the rare one is really rare.  The portrait silver used to be available in wholesale quantity.  In the last decades of the USSR the State Bank would sell it for outrageous high prices, then the prices weren't so high, then they stopped selling it.  I had a lot of cheap 1896, etc. rubles last year.  Now they're all gone.
 The gold 5 and 10 rubles were considered bullion coins until some time early last year.  Now they are all priced numismatically, even the circulated 5 rubles.  The 7.5 ruble is equal to the French 20 francs, was designed for convertibilty, was not uncommon, neither was the 15 ruble, the big ones are all rare.
 I mean, these coins are around.  Prices are too high.  Then they're gone, price wasn't high enough.  How do you know a Russian coin was too cheap?  You sold it.
 Commemoratives.  Nicholas' mint put out no less than 6 commemorative rubles.  Only one of them turns up: the 1913 dynastic tercentenary.  There is an earlier "low relief" variety and a later high relief.  It gets $100 in any decent grade now.  And the 1896 coronation ruble has wondered by on occasion.  Gracious collectors who have honored me with their collections have allowed a 1912 Napoleon's defeat and a (damaged) Alexander II memorial to pass through my loving hands, but never the Alexander III memorial, and a fake Gangut.
 World War I began for Russia with Nicholas not knowing what to do.  He didn't have to come to the defense of Serbia in the face of the Austrian ultimatum, or he could have had a partial mobilization on the Austrian border only, instead of the general mobilization he eventually declared, which guaranteed German participation if war was declared.  Austria did so, Russia asked for peace talks, Germany demanded Russian demobilization in 12 hours, July 31, 1914.  That did not happen.  The war began with big Russian defeats and then ground on through more defeats.
 Another story, the war.  It is said of the gold standard that since every kind of business is constrained by the available metal if a problem develops it gets very bad very quickly and stays that way until more gold appears.  Gold standard is, then, a sort of fair weather economic system.  As soon as war starts all of the gold (and silver) disappears completely and the government starts issuing chits and paper money and bonds.  All of those 100 and 500 rubles horseblanket banknotes are from the war.  So is the 1915 ruble but you don't find that one very often.
 1913 and 1914 used to be the easiest years to find for the minors, 1915 and 1916 were OK too, even the scarce Osaka issues were fairly available for a while.  Someone came along from Vladivostok with a bag in the 90s probably.  The 1917 coins were and must remain scarce.
 Things got worse and worse as the war dragged on, there got to be hunger.  Anti-government activity and disorder appeared as early as 1915, government personnel experienced a high turnover rate.  It began to be evident that Nicholas was not running the show, his role being to appear in public as a morale booster.  But the gang that was administering the mess was not making progress.  It got to be 1917.

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RUSSIA - part 20

 The communists had an idea back in the mid-19th century.  They kind of paraphrased and updated two of the main themes that Jesus talked about: nobody is better than anyone else (before, say, God) and that it is improper for people to take advantage of situations for, you know, their own benefit if it hurts somebody else.  Think that is a fair enough statement?  The world they lived in was the exact opposite of those concepts: hereditary class system and the ancient unfairness of human affairs which stipulated that if I'm lucky and you're not I can enslave you just because you can't stop me and that's OK.
 I mean, that's the way it was more or less everywhere from the neolithic to the 19th century.  Gang style warlordism everywhere.  The biggest warlords founded kingdoms and empires.  Here and there some tiny, precarious attempt at something a little more participatory and/or humane, most lasting as long as the dictator monarch who imposed his will in those directions died, or the little communitarian cluster of villages was overrun by the king, etc.  Examples: the very limited municipal democracy of Athens, the partial democracy of the Roman Republic.
 That was until we Americans came along.  We were the first country since ancient times to organize on the principle that ordinary people can run their own country.  Then came the French revolution, nuttily spinning out of control and bringing iron-fist reaction from the despotic governments of the rest of Europe, reactive rebellions to the repressions, etc.  Concerned people everywhere gathered in the coffee shops and taverns and churchyards and talked about what to do.
 And there was this tremendous increase in mobility that came with the growth of railroads, people moved around, got smarter by way of doing new things.
 I got halfway through Karl Marx's "Capital."  Extremely boring.  Guy was a first rate pedant.  But, his basic principle, in my own personal opinion, was sound.  That principle is that greedy people have been shown through history a tendency to  unfairly take more than their share and to arrange the administration of human social conduct so as to allow themselves to state that their mean and hurtful behavior is proper.  I mean, can that be argued with?  That is the way it is, is it not?
 Then he went on to propose organizational remedies for the situation.  He identified the unreasonable accumulation of personal wealth as an obstacle to the progress of humanity as a whole, proposed that what we now call public ownership or government ownership was necessary to ensure that the railroads, for example, got built, suggested that the course of history showed that people got interested in running their own lives as they get more educated, that, taken a few more steps it was therefore "inevitable" that social control of society would become the norm as autocracy was the norm at that time.  It seemed reasonable to call that train of thought "socialist."
 A thought beyond socialism was the idea that personal property in general was a problem and that the "answer" was a new type of person who cared for the whole in preference to the self, and that position came to call itself communist.  An evolution of moral awareness was thought to be necessary.  This would be brought about by education of the masses.  Socialists and communists therefore became strong and constant advocates of public education, deplored by conservatives at the time as injurious to the social order.  Education made people uppity.  Can't have that.
 Anyway, there was a lot of political ferment in Europe all through the 19th century, Russia had more than its share, it was considered by the western socialists that the revolution of educated workers they prophesied was unlikely to happen in such a backward, squalid, ignorant place as Russia.  Germany they thought.  Everyone in Germany knew how to read, the workers were feisty.  Bismarck took the the revolutionary socialists seriously.  That's why he put in social security and national health care in the later 19th century.  Buy them off.
 In Russia there was this idealistic movement of educated and upper class people who went to live among the poor and teach things like reading.  Reading what?  Socialist literature, why not?  And they would get a few takers here and there, sometimes, as the 19th century went on, more than a few.  And some of these friends of the downtrodden were not averse to violence, they saw what they did as defense of the "people's" interest against the depredations of a corrupt and violent state, itself the expression of a social order built on a foundation of iniquitous exploitation of some people by other people.
 In Russia, I think, it cannot be denied that their basic argument had legs.  .  The Russian state was fundamentally class based, prejudice was built into its structure, corruption (preferential treatment) was part of the law, infrastructure was dreadful, brutality was traditional.  In most circumstances one could not talk to government.  One could only try to avoid contact, for contact always meant an order that had to be obeyed.
 These were among the people awaiting a favorable moment, which came finally in 1917.
 Labor strikes, unit mutinies, rural "disorders" had been occurring with increasing frequency as the World War went on and life got harder.  In February, 1917 women textile workers in Petrograd (used to be St. Petersburg but that became too German-ish at the start of the World War) went on strike about hours and hunger.  Sympathy strikes began.  Police massed against demonstrations.  Violence occurred, deaths resulted.  Emperor Nicholas was advised by some to meet with the strikers but instead he called in the army and left town.  Some more violence, then the police and soldiers began to go over to the strikers' side, the railway workers went on strike, isolating the emperor in his retreat.  Anarchy in Petrogtrad, Moscow getting that way, mutinies spreading in the army.  A provisional government set up in Petrograd to keep things running, the socialists playing a double game of participating in the provisional system while setting up their own separate congress of local organizations so that from the first days of the revolution there were essentially two governments functioning side by side.
 The emperor, without resources, had a limited set of choices.  He chose to abdicate.  The provisional government declared a republic.
 That government inherited a disastrous situation and did not handle its portfolio particularly well.  The socialists in the government continued to play a double game of working with and against the provisionals while continuing to build their alternative governing structure of what they mostly called "workers' councils."  Lenin, major charismatic far left revolutionary who had been living abroad, was shipped back into Russia courtesy of the German high command, which saw a left victory in Russia as the promise of peace on that front.  The socialist slogan at the time was, after all, "Bread, Peace, Land."
 Left and right socialists contended with Lenin's left of left communists in councils across the nation during the warm months of 1917.  A point was reached in October at which the provisional government had become weak enough and the socialists strong enough that some began to see a coup as reasonable.  Socialists dithered, Lenin got his communists together for an armed takeover of critical ministries.  The provisionals were ousted, the army and police split, civil war began.
 Look at this: half the article written, nothing about coins.  Well, there weren't any.  Imperial coins - the 10, 15, and 20 kopeks, struck during January and February of 1917, all scarce, rare in today's market.  The provisional government issued coins for Finland only, in Russia only paper money.  One can see on some of the provisional banknotes more or less the same "scrawny" eagle used on the coins of the early 18th century.  Inflation had been the situation since 1915, got much worse during 1917, continued to get worse thereafter.
 Local monetary issues had appeared here and there before 1917 but they surged after the emperor's abdication as disorder spread.  About 99% of them were paper, but a few were metal.  Most are considered tokens rather than coins, there is no comprehensive catalog that I know of.  The only series that made it into the Standard Catalog are the Armavir coins of 1918.  It seems that the world is drowning in fake Armavirs at the moment.  I don't remember when I saw my last real one.
 Lenin took Russia out of the World War with a bad treaty.  The civil war had about 5 major factions and many minor players, with foreign armies sticking their noses in as far as the Czechs (!), for example, ending up fighting in Siberia.  Gradually the Soviets, as they were called, prevailed, until by 1921 the war was about done.  The Baltic coast, Finland, Poland and some other bits were gone, otherwise the country was the rest of the old Russian empire, including those pesky Caucasian ethnic regions.
 The new peace was "celebrated" with a currency reform in 1921 that had a precious metal component: 10, 15, 20, 50 kopeks and ruble on the old imperial module, even a gold 10 ruble.  The coins were made to demonstrate to the world that the new government was open for business and intended to play it straight, economically speaking.  The gold kind of seems to have been thought of as a flag waver gesture: we got gold!  Kind of like the ducats of Peter the Great.  Most of the almost 3 million made sat in government vaults as reserves, later melted, rare today.  The silver coins are not rare in circulated grades but are scarce in uncirculated and rare as proofs.  The rubles have become popular and are mostly out of dealer inventories at this time.

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RUSSIA - part 21

 The communists had a number of important structural and conceptual disadvantages that revealed themselves in philosophy, strategy, and execution.  Philosophically they had as an article of faith the idea that a new evolution of humanity would be required to produce the "new" person who would naturally strive for the good of all as opposed to the "primitive" human whose focus was on the self or the family.  They found that even amongst themselves the personalistic tendencies were strong, and amongst the masses they found overwhelming incomprehension.  They might as well have been Christian missionaries amongst the barbarians preaching "love your enemy."
 So they developed, way back in the 19th century, the idea of a "vanguard" of advanced specimens who would guide the masses on the path toward that bright future when the evolutionarily advanced toddler would naturally share its toys with its playmates and the grownups would naturally work things out in councils (soviets) and there would be no need for a government to tell people what to do.  The state would "wither" in the true communist condition in which people would naturally tend to "do the right thing."
 Plain old socialism people could understand.  It was about universal sufferage, parliamentary independence, abolition of hereditary rights, equal justice and opportunity, human rights separated from economic power.  Communism had a mystical pie-in-the-sky aspect in its formulation: the goal a change in the basic human condition, an unexaminable axiom similar in structure to the triune diety of the Christians.  And since none of the communists were that kind of "new person," even the vanguard they proposed (themselves) were in a crucial way working in the dark.
 Tough sell, that idea.  They realized early on that their only hope of coming to power would be force, so they planned for that eventuality and they got their chance one night late in 1917.  That night their one great advantage came to the fore and carried them through.  Clear lines of command.  They had that, their opponents didn't.  At the crucial moment their internal organization carried the day.
 In power they faced another structural problem, never mind the civil war that began immediately.  The communists had been criminals for decades, always on the move, sleep on someone's couch, borrow money for dinner.  They had essentially no experience at all in running bureaucracies.  Where were they going to get the expertise?  From the existing government of course.  Bureaucrats woke up and found they had a new boss, they could stay or they could go, many stayed, an element of continuity that always seems to occur in human history when a new boss comes in.  New boss looks at the admin machinery, says to a flunky: "find someone who knows how to run this," usually it ends up being someone from the old regime.  Keep the operation going, political changes can come later.
 And though they thought they were striving toward a future of universal responsible behavior in which leadership would be unnecessary they found themselves imposing their old style party command structure on the old style tsarist command structure, then they improved it with 20th century paperwork techniques until it became one of the tightest bureaucratic structures ever made.  (And it still had sloppy practices built in.)
 On the other hand the communist leaders had long experience in the most primitive style of human activity: gang warfare.  That was their milieu, they had to some degree the same kind of contempt for parliamentary debate and legislative authority that the tsars had possessed.  They were might-makes-right people, exemplars of the basic human approach to politics; the application of force.  If they couldn't bring someone around to their "correct" point of view their developed tendency was to just shoot them if they could.  The result was that there came to be an element of window dressing to their legislative construction (rubber stamp parliament), and their succession mechanism was the same kind of competition as is seen in dog packs and gangs today (ambush in the night).
 The imposed ideology and pretense of thought control, so reminiscent of the approach of Alexander III, collectivization of agriculture an echo perhaps of the military settlements  of the early 19th century.  Prisoners to emulate the state serfs of Peter the Great.  Whack the troublesome ethnics.  The command economy itself was simply the tsarist program in overalls; the government had always been the biggest customer in Russia, they just threw out the bosses as middlemen and took over the workers themselves.  Seems reasonable, if people weren't, you know, people, not "new people."  Hence the constant pretending.
 It was enough to give socialism a bad name.
 And they found that they substantially could not get agriculture to work right because farmers would always try to improve their personal positions and never wanted to cooperate in larger associations, at least not the way the government wanted to do it.  Government had confiscated harvests to feed the cities during the civil war, lots of farmers had died.  Widespread resistance to collectivizing agricultural reform was repressed with traditional Russian brutality.
 The country was very depleted, a lot of infrastructure destroyed, commodity reserves low, missing males from the wars, illiteracy, malnutrition, etc.  Population was called upon to sacrifice, work without pay, do without.  Just like the last 200 years, that was the same kind of thing Peter the Great used to say.
 Heroic measures ineptly applied in the most brutal manner in pursuance of flawed policies nevertheless produced by the 30s a large increase in industrial capacity, growing agricultural output, literacy in the 90% range (was never better than the 40% range under the tsars).  But no luck at all, there was Hitler, World War II just around the corner.
 Stalin has been famous for his paranoia, but he came by it naturally.  From his youthful days as a revolutionary bank robber he had risen in the ranks of the party by adroit application of intrigue and influence backed up by violence.  Paranoia is part of that lifestyle.  And on the international level the whole capitalist world was actively and openly conspiring against them, at least the way they saw it.
 And Hitler really did have a bunch of spies all over the place, subversives out in the ethnic republics, sowing seeds of sedition.  The threat was real.  But Russian campaigns had a history of excessive zeal and sloppy organization.  The mindset was when in doubt arrest, arrest was tantamount to guilt.  Functionaries trained to produce the expected answer.  They inherited that outlook from the tsars.
 In short, I think its fair to say, complete lack of checks and balances.
 World War II, the Soviet Union lost, oh, maybe 25 million. Sloppy records, records missing,  some fuzz in the estimate, could be a million or so in either direction.  When they won they were determined to prevent the reestablishment of the ring of enemy countries that used to surround them.  They couldn't help alienating those conquered peoples, they were Russians after all, with the classical rough Russian governing style.  Ancient governing philosophy: the subjects are there to serve.  Wait until told what to do.
 And it is true that there was talk at the end of the war that the other "allies" should continue the war only against the Soviets.  Churchill had a study made, Truman looked at it, said the USA wasn't interested.  Stalin knew about the plan, the posture he took in eastern Europe grew out of that knowledge, besides, Poland had invaded Russia during the civil war, everyone remembered.  Kind of everyone sat there and snarled at each other for 40 years.
 Lets talk about Soviet coins.  For starters, it was illegal to collect coins for many of the Soviet decades.  It was considered to be hoarding, an economic crime, some economic crimes carried the death penalty.  You could collect stamps.  Coin collecting was theorized to demonstrate an unhealthy interest in money, a bourgeois obsession, good communists could better spend their time going to meetings or propagandizing.  So all the coin collectors hid their coins for maybe 60 years.
 We should note another instance of continuity with tsarist practice, the mint operation under the early Soviets was substantially the tsarist organization, with mostly the same people.  The initial Soviet coinage was issued on the tsarist module, including the silver coins, which is more than could be said for, say, France and Spain, where the silver disappeared after World War I.  There were a number of currency reforms from the revolution on, latest in 1997  The Soviet currency was fiat based with the abandonment of silver in 1930, they would monkey with the offical exchange rate depending on situations.  Most of the "reforms" involved the devaluation with limited redemption of the old currency, essentially an extra special tax.  These can be seen in successive paper money issues over the years.  The coins pretty much didn't change, only details from 1930 on, even after the 100 to 1 reform of 1958.
 And they didn't believe in commemorative coins for a long time.  They thought it was crass to "monetize" the commemoration, as it were.  Interesting: they had started out their revolution by abolishing hierarchies and not issuing medals for distinction but almost immediately abandoned that position when they came to power and restored rank and distinction, with decorative male jewelry (medals) until everyone above the age of 7 I think got a chance to earn a "position" in society, in the end outdoing the tsars.  Similarly, when they remembered what the Romans knew about commemorative coins they went hog wild.  That was 1965, the year after Khruschev had been ousted in the gang war that was Soviet politics.  Sign of progress, noted at the time: the new guys didn't arrest him or kill him, they just told him to shut up and go home.
 The first series of USSR coins was the copper and silver issue of 1924-30 with the motto "workers of the world unite."  Copper coins were half, 1, 2, 3, and 5 kopeks.  Except for the half kopek each denomination was made in reeded and plain edge varieties, there is a steep price differential for each denomination, 1925 dates for 1 and 2 kopeks, scarce and rare.  These days those coins tend to be compromised in some way or other: cleaned, nicked, corroded, stained.  The halves are often high grade but spoiled with tiny green spots, I don't think I've seen them heavily circulated.
 The silver minors do not have much of a price differential by date except for the rare 1931 coins which were not released.  High grades not uncommon, uncirculated rare.  They can still be found in dealer stocks but they are beginning to flow back to Russia now that most of the tsarist material has been bought.  The major silver; 50 kopeks and ruble, not rare, but prices for choice pieces have become ridiculous like most other Russian coins.  And there is this rare edge legend containing the weight "dolya" that makes it necessary to examine every ruble but probably you'll never find it, I never have.
 The dolya/gramm edge situation illustrates a recurring feature of Soviet coinage: there are varieties, lots of them.  And there are collectors, mainly Russian, who treat Soviet coins the way cherry pickers treat pennies.  There is a book: MONETY SSSR by A.A. Shchelokov, Moscow, 1989+, that shows hundreds of varieties in wheat details, lettering, number size and so forth.  There are also mismatched die errors throughout the Soviet years.  One doesn't run into off center errors and suchlike, at least I haven't, but wrong "other" die, numerous instances..
 In 1926 the copper minors were replaced with smaller aluminum bronze ones.  The early ones have become rare and expensive in uncirculated, prices at the lower end are probably some level above the Standard Catalog prices, though some of the latest increases may turn out to have overshot the mark a bit.  Time will tell.
 In 1935 the invitation to world revolution was dropped in line with the new formulation of "socialism in one country," which had been communist heresy but had become the only acceptable formulation under the circumstances of the time, need for solidarity against Hitler and his version of "socialism-in-one-country" and all.  The basic design of the coins remained more or less the same until the end of the Soviet Union, changes in details only.
 As prices have increased for Soviet coins key dates have emerged.  The levels have jelled on the Russian collector side, the top end is open, the situation is fluid, us non-Russians are on the outside.  Raise the price on whatever you have left.  If you sold it it was too cheap.
 Proofs.  They made proofs the way the tsars did: sloppy administration.  There are lots of proofs in the aggregate, but probably mintages for all of them were very low: hundreds maybe, maybe dozens, not every denomination, not every year.  Is there a complete "set" at the mint?  Probably not.  Paperwork?  Probably not.  Consider all of the non-commemorative proofs to be rare.
 Sets.  The earliest mint set I've seen was 1957.  Starting in 1961 the coins in the sets were struck on polished planchets and somehow this made them more susceptible to spotting (especially the yellow ones) than regular circulation strikes.  The value of unspotted sets for most years is some multiple of Standard Catalog, whatever it says this year.  There are dates that seem to show up only in sets, never in circulation.  I have no details.  One can see in the Standard Catalog some individual minors with prices like $30.00 in uncirculated but the mintset of that year is $10.00.  Almost all of the mintset prices are too low anyway, or were last time I looked, but there is also the possibility that the high price for a single in high grade indicates a coin that was actually released in sets only.  I have not run into the study of the 1961 series if it has been made.
 Commemoratives.  Coin collecting had become a popular national pastime in the USA in the 40s, spurred by the foreign pocket change brought home by GIs, growth in disposable income.  It grew in the 50s and 60s, reaching a crest of general popularity just around the time of the silver crisis of 1964, when they minted and then melted all those 1964 Peace dollars.  Then TV went color and that was the end of collecting (anything) as a mass market phenomenon.
 In response to the essentially worldwide interest in coins many countries were issuing commemoratives, they were being collected.  The profit mechanism was obvious: seigniorage, the difference between face value and cost of production.  Plus a commemorative could be packaged and sold, even to collectors abroad.  The Russians first tried it in 1965.  They liked it.  Kept on doing it, more and more as the years passed, until in 1991, the last Soviet year, 39 different commemoratives including silver, gold and platinum that Soviet citizens had to get a permit to own or something like that.  There are rare varieties, hard to find precious metal coins.  Execution becomes flawless.  The later ones require certificate and packaging to be considered top level.
 The copper-nickel coins used to be 100% who cares, now rare varieties have emerged, proofs of the early ones are rare, there is cherry picking going on.  At the same time there are people there with hoards, thousands of uncirculated coins they are selling for a buck or two each.
 The novodels.  In 1986 the mint created a flight of fancy program of restriking the commemorative rubles back to 1965 less the Olympics in proof with an edge legend that contained the letter "N" for novodel.  The coins were sold at a premium, though evidently not as a complete set.  They were criticised at the time as foofery, enough were made that they are cheap, those are the only novodels of the Soviet period.  Does the mint keep all the old dies?  I think so.  Do they deface them?  I think not.  Maybe I'm wrong.  Somebody tell me.
 Patterns.  The mint under the tsars was fond of experimenting with new possible coins, the Soviets did not shrink from making models either.  There are a lot of known patterns.  They almost never show up in the collector market.

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RUSSIA - part 22
 

 It is a whole other thing when a historical narrative spills out into the present, meaning I was here when it was happening.  I remember how those stupid stodgy Communists would keep pulling their everything's-all-perfect-here-we-all-love-each-other-your days-are-numbered-you-evil-capitalists shtick for my entire young life until we had to smuggle in our Beatles tapes because the border guards would confiscate them - they were decadent bourgeois artifacts that would corrupt the socialist Soviet youth in solidarity with the oppressed colonial peoples of the world.  They'd trade you for your blue jeans with gold, icons.  The bosses maintained a complete ideological shell around everything.  The whole country was supposed to have one opinion, enforced.  Basically the same governing philosophy as the tsars, to whit: tell the people what to do and then make them do it.
 In 1973 there was a palace coup in Afghanistan.  The king was out of country, his cousin took over, declared a republic.  The new guy had been prime minister, etc., during which he had developed increasingly close cooperation with his Soviet neighbor, his approaches to Britain and USA having been rebuffed.  The deposed king had been governing through a democratic constitution, the new president replaced that with an appointed rubber stamp "loya jurga."  (We know all these Afghan terms these days.)  He signed papers with the Soviets, they started sending lots of military stuff over, with advisors to advise.
 At the same time, this guy, Muhammad Daoud was his name, turned out to be something of a Pashtun nationalist, and he was dabbling with some arrangement with Pakistan, more or less an ally of China, at that time quite at odds with the Soviets.  Pakistanis didn't trust Daoud, he had talked about annexing part of Pakistan, the western Pashtun part, to create a greater "Pashtunistan."  Soviets were pouring so much materiel into Afghanistan, and engineering projects, and diplomats, they were getting to feel like they had a stake there.  Muhammad Daoud having his own foreign policy seemed to be becoming somewhat against the grain, Soviets began to wonder if there wasn't something better to do in Afghanistan than work with that guy.
 Daoud for his part was getting cold feet about the Soviets and decided he wanted to go third way, making deals with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India.  Around then he decided to suppress a fundamentalist movement that was becoming politically organized, violently chased the leaders out of the country into Pakistan, where they were warmly received by Pakistani military intelligence, who trained them and sent them back to Afghanistan to make trouble.
 Soviets plotted and schemed in the standard manner and at a certain point there got to be disruptions in Afghanistan, there was a military coup, Daoud was assassinated, a pro-Soviet government was set up in 1978.  That government immediately banned beards and burqas (reminds one of Peter the Great), forbade the operations of mosques, instant land reform.  Results similar to Russia circa 1918: revolt in the countryside by "mujahideen" began almost immediately.  Response from the Afghan government similar to the Russian government of 1918: terror.
 That government proved to be unstable, there was a coup, then another coup.  The conservative rebellion grew, the government asked the Soviets for help, they invaded, got stuck.  Didn't know what to do.
 Since the end of World War II the Soviets had been spending way too much on military, and they had never gotten their agriculture right.  By the 80s there was essentially no growth, then in 1985 there was a big drop in the price of oil and there was less money to do things with.  Gorbachov came to power in 1986 and relaxed the political censorship.  A lot of bile started to come out of the Soviet public.  Then Chernobyl happened.  Gorbachov tried to cover it up, that became impossible.
 The Wikipedia article on Gorbachov takes the position that while he was opening up public debate he was doing essentially nothing about the economic situation.  People therefore were riling themselves up but there was no amelioration of their deteriorating qualities of life except they were allowed to talk about how bad things were.  Actual rebellions started to gel here and there.  Gorbachov continued on the free thought path, Wiki article wonders why he didn't go like the Chinese went later: economic reform first, free thought never.  But that is essentially how it went.  The Soviet Union talked itself out of existence.
 Gorbachov took Russian troops out of Afghanistan in 1987.  There was drift among the Communists, he continued to push political reform, continued to neglect the economy, an attempted coup was thwarted essentially by the new communications medium the worldwide web.  Warsaw pact allies began to withdraw, then the European satellite governments were replaced one after another by something pointed toward parliamentary democracy, then constituent Soviet republics seceded, in every case the government refrained from comprehensive violence, after a while it became obvious that such action was no longer possible.  Then in 1991 the republics met in council and decided to end the Soviet Union and there were 15 new countries.  Russia, the biggest one, was declared the successor state for UN membership purposes.
 It got rather disorderly.  A lot of stuff was suddenly up for grabs.  The military medal depository was substantially pilfered for example, that's where all the Orders of Lenin came from.  Russian government has declared all of those to be state property subject to seizure.  I sold one recently.  But the Hermitage and mint collections were not attacked.  The country became thoroughly privatized in the most egregiously unfair manner, a new batch of economic nobles emerged, then the statists reasserted themselves and now there is a traditional strongman government in democratic disguise doing normal Russian things for normal Russian reasons.  From their point of view all of their worst fears have been realized: they are surrounded by hostile or unstable neighbors, their human resources are inadequate to the tasks of governing their territory.  They maybe should have hired the Dalai Lama as a drama coach or something, but they never thought of that.  Russian solutions to Russian problems.  So what if they don't work?
 Numismatically, in 1991, in addition to the regular USSR coins with their L or M mintmarks, and the mint sets from both mints, and the 30+ commemoratives, there were the Gosbank coins issued later in the year as the government fell apart and the free ruble was sinking.  The "regular" coins are too common, can't sell them, except there are scarce mintmarks and the 1992 10 roubles that I've never seen.  First bimetal coins, the yellow part in that crappy high zinc brass that grows black spots so easily.  And there was that silly cheap knockoff - the souvenir reissue of the 1902 37.5 roubles in low class copper-nickel, what else for than for the mint employees to make some money, they probably were getting paid last year's wage rate, inflation was in triple digits.  Oil, the prime Russian export, got to be ridiculously cheap, under $1.00 a gallon one year in the early 90s I seem to recall.  There was no money.
 Everybody started selling all of their stuff.  Great masses of old coins and medals and stuff came on the market.  Whole country was for sale.  Golden age of Russiana for the non-domestic Russophiles.  That outflow went on for about ten years, then the Russian economy started to improve with rising price of oil.  Then Russians started making some money and they started buying back their stuff.  The repatriation of Russiana has become raging fierce and continues until this very moment.  In the long run, it seems, they may well buy back all of it.
 The mint went to work making and selling art coins of all metals and prices from 1992 on.  The artwork and production are invariably superb.  With the circulation coins the mints at Moscow and St. Petersburg are up to their traditional tricks, occasionally mismatching dies or edge, leaving the mintmark off the die, etc.  People buy all of these modern Russian coins, sometimes someone asks me about some particular item, usually I don't have it.  I've bought collections of the silver commemoratives for some set of years, invariably they're incomplete, there are so many coins, usually some of the packaging is missing, but the coins are perfect.
 There is an exonumia angle to Soviet and post-Soviet times that should be mentioned briefly.  The tsars had been fond of "table: medals and jetons from the late 17th century when they began westernizing.  There are hundreds of types, catalogs to describe some of them, a market, fakes to deceive the credulous.  The Soviets made a few commemorative and award medals until the 1960s, when they started making lots of them in various base metals including aluminum.  I've probably seen 50-100 different, probably a small fraction of what there is.  And I saw little incomplete catalogs: Medalii SSSR and so forth, Soviet publishers, 1980s.  Hard to find these days, nobody wants them, not antique enough.
 Metal tokens in the contemporary European spirit began to be used here and there from the mid-19th century, the practice continued and grew, though most of the issues turned out in the end to be paper.  For the period of about 1914 to 1924 or so there were thousands of local paper issues and a few of metal, dwindling to pretty much nothing in the 1930s, except for the Spitsbergen issues (again, mostly paper).  Spitsbergen has its own entry in the Standard Catalog, get to it later.  The paper catalog is by a guy named Ryabachenko, published in independent Ukraine.  The metal token catalog would probably be maybe a page or two, perhaps it exists.
 Then from about 1987 there started another bloom of local issues, mostly paper, except for transit and telephone tokens.  Thousands of paper chits by agricultural and industrial organizations, local governments, later private associations and pyramid schemes.  Find most of them in the Ryabachenko books.  There are catalogs of the transit and phone tokens too, author is Kozhara, published in Estonia.  Pretty much these latter day notgeld had disappeared by the late 90s, though one still finds banknote shaped message papers - advertising, political, etc.  They seem to like those special notes in Lithuania, maybe not so much in Russia.  Maybe they're illegal there, so many rules, never enough police.