In response to last week's installment of Steve Bishop's series, Ken Spindler of San Diego, CA writes:

Steve adds:

Russian overstruck coins were a common thing in 1700s. In the early 1700s when Peter I decided to change the Russian currency to decimal coinage, a lot of silver and copper were needed. As Russiastruggled to source enough silver for her own coinage, foreign coins were imported to temporary solve this problem. The first sign of this was in 1655 where German thalers, Spanish patagons and otherforeign coins were countermarked. Some of these coins were then overstruck.

This soon became an easy solution to remove coins that were no longer suited for circulation as it was cheaper than melting down coins and make new planchets. There might have been some politicsinvolved such as increasing the denomination due to massive inflation. Another reason might be to remove the previous Tsar / Tsarina image as soon as possible from circulation. This however meantthat coins looked "uglier" or unique as underlying image impacted the overall look. Some overstruck coins can be interesting as the original host coins might have started out to beuncommon, making it rarer than other coins. In fact, all overstruck coins are unique which makes this section very quite interesting. This practice stopped in the early 1800s as Russia increasedmining production and minting technology improved.

To read the complete article, see:
Russian overstruck coins (www.gxseries.com/numis/rus_imperial/overstrike/rus_overstruck.htm)