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Sale 46
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Lot 803
Russia. Ruble, 1721 (Moscow). Dav-1655; Sev-519; Uzd-599; KM-157.5. Peter I, 1682-1725. Laureate, draped, and cuirassed bust right. Reverse: Crowned double-headed eagle, with scepter and orb. Minor planchet flaw on reverse edge; also a few scattered surface deposits. A marvelous strike, with only trivial weakness at eagle's breast. Fully lustrous, with proof-like fields. Very Rare in this grade. NGC graded MS-63 Prooflike.
The son of Czar Alexei Michailovitch and Natalia Narishkina, Peter was co-Czar with his half-brother, Ivan V, under the regency of his sister Sophia from 1682 to 1689. After a palace coup to remove Sophia, Peter began his sole reign and commenced his Herculean task of modernizing Russia militarily, technologically, and culturally. Herculean may truly be more apropos than poetic, since Peter stood a burly six foot eight. Even so, considering the internal resistance he had to meet and overcome, his successes appear phenomenal.
Peter was truly a "hands on" administrator. He believed in starting from the bottom and working his way up. He learned shipbuilding from the Europeans he invited to Russia, and even built a ship himself, which he sometimes captained. In 1697, he accompanied an embassy to European courts as a carpenter named Peter Mikhailov. He also served as seaman, soldier, and barber, and surely to the discomfort of his courtiers, he even practiced dentistry.
Peter also sent Russians out to be educated in the West, and in return imported skilled labor, as well as military and administrative experts from abroad. He encouraged smoking, but taxed tobacco. Even the condition of being hairsuite became a point of focus for him. Because European men usually were clean-shaven, Peter became infamous among his tradition-oriented countrymen for taxing the wearing of beards. Also, he modernized the calendar, introduced the use of European style of Arabic numbers, and encouraged private industry and mining. Remarkably, Peter managed to modernize Russia without borrowing money from the state. Instead, he taxed his citizens heavily.
Militarily, his foreign wars were directed to one significant goal, that of obtaining ice free ports for his navies. Obtaining Baltic ports led to the protracted Great Northern War with Charles XII of Sweden. Less successful wars were waged against the Turks in order to acquire access to the Black Sea.
Among Peter's other great reforms, he brought his country's coinage system from being the most old fashioned in Europe to being the most up to date. Amazingly, his was the first coinage to be ordered on the decimal system. Part of his reform involved devaluation. This made for the first time the Russian unit of account, the Ruble, to be equivalent to the Polish, Saxony, and Silesian thalers that had seen such free circulation within the country before. Dividing the Ruble into one hundred smaller units were the copper Kopecks. It is said that when the first ruble coins bearing Western style Arabic dates were struck in 1707, it was Peter himself operating the coin press!
Estimated Value $6,000 - 7,000.
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| Realized $35,650 |
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