MT: Peter the Great's Birthday, 1672
ANA
Transcript No. 1482
June 9, 1998
PETER THE GREAT'S BIRTHDAY, 1672
by Richard Doty
Today marks the birthday of one of the most amazing monarch in all of
history, Peter the Great of Russia.
Peter was born in 1672 and came to the throne of a half-barbaric nation
at the age of seventeen. Until his death in 1775, he had but one goal in
mind: the modernization of his sprawling, backward domains - for their and
his own good. He would do so by persuasion if possible, by force if
necessary.
Peter's strong hand modernized everything he saw, and his keen eye saw
much in need of reform. Nobles were ordered to shave off their beards,
adopt modern Western dress-if not, they had to pay a heavy tax, for which
they received a token picturing a beard and moustache, proof that they had
obeyed the order. Other modern nations had navies, so Russia must have one
too. The seven-foot tsar traveled to Holland and England to obtain advice
and skilled personnel, and actually constructed one of the earliest vessels
with his own hands. Modern states had magnificent cities for their capitals
rather than overgrown villages such as Moscow; so in 1703, the Tsar began
the construction of a lovely new city called St. Petersburg, to which he
and his court shortly moved.
In his zeal for modernization, Peter outdid the Western states whose
ways he was emulating in one surprising area - coinage. No state had a
decimal coinage system in 1700; but Peter gave Russia just such an
arrangement in that year, with a silver rouble divided into copper kopeks
and their multiples. And he also undertook the nation's first
machine-struck coinage.
Peter's decimal concept remained confined to Russia through most of the
eighteenth century, the idea had to wait for the American and French
Revolutions to gain a wider popularity, but the fact remained that Russia
had the concept first - and that a Russian tsar made numismatic history in
the process.
This has been "Money Talks." Today's program was written by Richard
Doty and underwritten by Whitman Coin Products, a division of Golden Books,
providing quality coin products for more than 50 years. "Money Talks" is a
copyrighted production of the American Numismatic Association, 818 N.
Cascade Ave., Colorado Springs, CO 80903, 719/632-2646, a...@money.org,
http://www.money.org.