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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Numismatic Map Of Ukraine:

19 October, 1999 - 00:00

(Continued from No. 37)

1648 saw the beginning of the Ukrainian Cossack Revolutionby
Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky against the domination of the Polish nobility.
The preconditions soon emerged for Ukraine to mint coins of its own, as
long as the young state's institutions are in the making.

Even now experts still argue whether Ukraine issued coins
at that time. So far the skeptics have the upper hand: not a single Ukrainian-struck
coin from the late seventeenth century has been found.

It is at this time stretch that Ukraine gradually lost
its political status (the Ruin) and, therefore, the opportunity to strike
its own coins. Its lands were under Poland (the Right Bank) and the Tsardom
of Muscovy (the Left Bank and Kyiv), so the money of those states predominated
in circulation. Ukraine's boundless expanses also saw the large flows of
West European coins (mainly the thalers of German duchies and Switzerland,
silver Dutch leeuwendaalders, golden Dutch ducats, Hungarian, and Austrian
florins). It should be noted that thalers became an international equivalent,
for they had had an unchanged weight and purity for over two centuries.
The Dutch leeuwendaalders, known here as levky (lions, for they sported
a sitting lion) were of much lower quality. This is why low-grade silver
came to be called levky- type. Leeuwendaalders occur very often
in troves on the Ukrainian territory.

However, gold continued to play a great role on European
markets. The ducat, weighing about 3.5 g of 18- karat gold, equaled two
thalers. But both ducats and thalers more often served for accumulation,
gifts, and paying remuneration to mercenaries. Fractional coins — chetvertaky,
orty,
tymfy, shostaly, shahy, and others — were of a notably
inferior quality than thalers and mostly catered to the lower strata of
society.



The Tsardom of Muscovy minted for many years only coins
of one denomination — silver kopecks weighing 0.68 g. The system of money
circulation in Northeastern Rus was undoubtedly archaic, even backward,
in essence. The sixteenth century kopecks were of high purity, for they
were mainly made of West European thalers, which were melted down and then
drawn into a silver wire. The small cuts of the latter were flattened and
various images were then struck on them (as a rule, a lance-bearer on horseback,
at first the Tsar and then St. George). Hence the name kopeck (from the
Russian kopye meaning lance). These silver coins begin to capture
the markets of Ukraine, especially after 1654. But even in the early eighteenth
century West European coins felt themselves hosts, rather than guests,
on the territory of Ukraine.

Purely Polish and Lithuanian coins continued to circulate
in Right- Bank Ukraine, but they were issued in small numbers, and their
quality (especially of small-denomination Polish coins) remained unsatisfactory.
The state of a protracted crisis, culminating in three partitions of Poland
in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, was also reflected on coins.

Moscow attempted in 1654-1663 to adjust the monetary system
to the new conditions. They began to mint the silver ruble and the half-
poltina.
They also struck copper coins worth a poltina (50 kopecks), altyn
(3 kopecks), and groshevik (2 kopecks). At face value, a ruble
equaled 100 silver kopecks, but in fact only 50-55. Very soon the government
abandoned its plans, for the populace took a dim view of such reforms.
In June 1662 a Copper Rebellion even broke out, caused by the minting of
copper coins which replaced the customary silver ones. The Ukrainian population
also resisted this expansion of copper: merchants, urban and rural dwellers
refused to take this quasi-money from the Russian military stationed in
numerous Left-Bank garrisons.

In 1655 Moscow also put into circulation the full-fledged
West European thalers (ancestor of dollars), the so-called “marked yefimki

(from the city of Joachimstahl in Bohemia, where the first thalers were
coined). The thalers bore two images in relief: the date and the Tsar on
horseback. But this attempt to create a window on Europe also failed. Only
Peter the Great managed to put into practice the concepts of his father
Aleksei Mikhailovich. In 1704 a silver ruble was minted. The new “old”
coin was equal to the thaler by all parameters (weight and purity). The
population of Eastern Ukraine, already fifty years under Russian protectorate,
got used quite rapidly to the new money.

After the Battle of Poltava, Peter the Great began to fight
the coins of European countries, first of all those of Poland, which he
“threw out and destroyed in great quantity throughout Little Russia.” The
monetary reform in Russia (1700-1718) became one of the successes of the
restless and energetic reformer Tsar: in addition to the silver ruble,
he also put into circulation silver poltiny (50 kopecks), half-
poltiny,
grivny (10 kopecks), altyns (5), as well as gold chervontsy
(10 rubles). Small- denomination kopecks, dengi,
polushki,
and half- polushki played the role of fractional coins. Russian
coins were struck according to European standards, and the relationship
between the face value of precious metals and copper did not differ from
generally-accepted norms of the time. Now the coins obligatorily bore their
face value, place and date of coinage, the portrait of a ruler, his name,
titles, and great seal.

Later on, throughout the eighteenth century, we will mostly
see the portraits of Tsars and Tsarinas on large-denomination coins. Starting
from the reign of Paul I (1796-1801), portraits rarely appear on Russian
imperial coins, except for the trial issues of the so-called “Polish coins”
by Alexander I and Nicholas I, which were minted for Poland, with due account
of the local system of money circulation. Only the two last Romanov-dynasty
Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II were satisfied with their portraits.

The eighteenth century witnessed of the decline and fall
of the once powerful Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Its finances were
finally undermined: true Polish and Lithuanian coins were issued in rather
limited quantities, while silver coins were only called so, for they were
in fact billon, i.e., less than 50% precious metal. The expansion of both
West European and Russian coins (the latter being of an enviable quality)
brought about, to a high extent, another cause for the Commonwealth's decline:
dependence of a country's financial system on external factors comes to
no good. After the partitions, the Ukrainian lands became part of the Russian
and Austrian Empires (Eastern Galicia). These monarchies had a powerful
and unified money system which made issuing coins for Ukraine utterly impossible.
Money circulation in the nineteenth century on the territory of modern
Ukraine was completely subordinated to the financial policies of the Romanovs
and Habsburgs. But that is another topic.

№39 October 19 1999 «The
Day»


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