1779 Russia 5 Kopeks

It's been a long time since I played with world coins, but at $10 I think it's a very fair price.

The coin you just added to your collection comes from the Yekaterinburg Mint in the Ural Mountains. Most of the copper five kopeck coins were struck at this mint and in fact all such coins that I own, from the year 1759 to 1834, originate from this mint.

The cypher stands for Ekaterina II Imperatritsa (in Russian). The highly sought after copper five kopeck coins from this period come from the Kolyvan Mint in Siberia and can easily be distinguished by their dark chocolate color.

It is the weight that counted at the time. The weight of the copper being equal to five kopecks in silver at the time of minting. Over the next century and a half the size of the copper coins slowly shrinks as the value and uses of copper grow.

Here is an excellent website that should be able to answer any more of your questions: http://home.earthlink.net/~smoulding/

They were milled. Think of these large Russian coppers more like ingots produced by the government. They were generally poorly struck, uneven, broken dies, rotated dies, etc. The weight counted for the conversion between copper and silver based on the pood standard. Many Russian copper coins of the XVIII century are overstruck on earlier coins due to shifting of the copper/silver ratio.