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Danes Arrested for Bringing Coins to Russia
 | By Bob Reis, World Coin News
June 18, 2009 |
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 seven 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 dust bin 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 are far in excess of the Standard Catalog of World Coins (and paper - nothing to discuss - is 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 where, 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 and 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. It was 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. It was made up of big money people and an occasional free peasant, which was 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. 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 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 meaning "white." Maybe 300 years ago none of these people thought of themselves as different groups. They spoke more or less the same language and 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 and 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.
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, and 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 by the end of the 17th century, descendents of formerly free peasants had become in all but the most nit-picky 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 patriarch banned musical instruments in 1636. Echoes of the Taliban. A couple of show bonfires. It 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. Had 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, were 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 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, "Thank you, 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 and 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 an underweight blundered Mikhail types, some with a "mintmark" of "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.
Please get in touch with comments, corrections, information or pictures for upcoming articles. My address: P.O. Box 26303, Raleigh, NC 27611; e-mail: reisbiz@earthlink.net.
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