By Bob Reis, World Coin News January 19, 2010

Alexander I of Russia. What melodrama is Russian imperial history! His father Paul, yet another ruler, was assassinated. The son was supposedly somehow in cahoots with the conspiracy but, they say, he begged, no, ordered them not to kill his dad, but they did anyway, and from then on there was a tear in his soul that never healed.

He was in his way very like the father he disdained, notwithstanding his grandmother, the Great Catherine, having confided (perhaps falsely) that father’s bastardy, took him away from poor Paul, apparently to groom as her heir. Alas for Catherine’s plan, if she indeed had it, death came to her unheralded, one day a coma, next day gone. Not-quite-all-there Paul came to the throne. A decade of policy consisting of bureaucratic tunnel vision on the one hand and wild wisps of dreamy pie in the sky nonsense in a time of constant war. Paul was assassinated in the time of Napoleon.

We don’t pay enough attention to these conquering hero dictator kinds of guys even though they come up fairly frequently in human history. They study their forerunner’s lives and actions from Ramses of Egypt through Alexander and Caesar to Chingis and Tamerlane and Napoleon and Hitler, hoping someday to emulate. When fate smiles upon that type everything changes afterward.

The Russian money and power of the time were watching Napoleon and Paul, and watching most of all their family interests. They schemed and eventually something emerged. A pack of drunken palace louts, so it was said, were given the proper promises by whoever it was that gave them, and broke into his apartment in the Palace and put him down.

I wonder whatever happened to those particular drunken louts? The normal procedure in high political murders is for the tools to be destroyed lest they brag drunkenly at some future date and perhaps mention some name.

Alexander, emperor in 1801 at the only technically adult age of 24 (my older son 23 at the moment, my own experience and that of everyone I know – I shudder to imagine being ruled by a 24 year old, still imagining that the truth can be known, that good intentions count, that justice is obvious, that happily can somehow be ever after). Napoleon was 32, and his only remaining illusion was that fate might be smiling upon him, advancing toward the zenith of his wild career.

When Napoleon was working for the revolutionary French government, he represented to the crowned heads the rest of Europe, and the class struggle that they had been routinely suppressing since the uncounted peasant and slave revolts of all human history. In 1804, when he got himself crowned emperor by the pope (“Hey, what’s going on!” Cried the “real” emperor of Austria, theoretically there’s supposed to be only one emperor at a time) the threat didn’t change, but they realized they were looking at a wannabe, not the end of the world as they knew it.

They still had to defeat the dude, he being an aggressive menace and all. Russia, from its official policy to the bottom of its soul, so to speak, thought of itself as the strong right arm of traditional legitimacy in Europe, the guardian of the divinely ordained guardians of the nations. Russia was always ready to tromp around in foreign lands and kill foreign people in defense of that divinely inspired mode of government – the absolute monarchy. On that point, the three successive monarchs with their tabloid family relations agreed without reservation.

Monarchy was divine and would be defended with blood; Russian blood, wherever needed.

Alexander, paradoxically, like his grandmother, had been raised in the presence of the egalitarian ideas of the 18th century “enlightenment,” those very ideas that had crystallized in the American and French revolutions, the anti-slavery movement, etc. Grandmother and grandson both thought the “brotherhood of man” was a noble and good idea but neither let those warm and fuzzy sentiments get in the way of the conduct of government. They oppressed their oppressible subjects, peasants, serfs, etc., corruptly accommodated their stronger subjects to obtain their ends, and increased their power in whatever ways were available.

Alexander was very young and idealistic, full of “If only we all just did this or that everything would be fine,” getting snitty when his fuddy-duddy old ministers turned out to be right when they told him whatever it was didn’t work. Alexander got a group of his buddies, all more or less his age, as his non-standard privy council, maybe analogous to FDR’s kitchen cabinet, to hatch a constitution, “fix” the serf problem, and other basic issues of the time. All liberal and idealistic, Alexander decreed freedom of the press, abolition of torture in legal investigations, other “progressive” stuff like that. The liberal stuff was met with foot dragging and incomprehension by both populace and bureaucracy and results were minor. The liberality went much further in the non-Russian western zones such as Poland, where things opened up enough that people started thinking nationalistic independence types of thoughts that would flower in bloody uprisings later.

Every approach toward the people’s freedom being productive of potentially anti-monarchic sentiment, more or less all of Alexander’s liberal reforms were first hemmed in, then modified into status quo conservatism if not completely rescinded. And there was, to boot, something of the same kind of personalized flighty inconstancy in policy that Paul so dramatically displayed. The emperor would change his mind and the whole country would have to change with him.

Who knows, he might have lost the country to some faction or other, or even one of the many local revolts could have grown into some Russian version of the French revolution had there not been that overwhelming foreign threat, Napoleon.

Paul had been battling the French until 1801 when, apparently for personal reasons, he left the anti-French coalition and became neutral. Alexander went a bit further in that direction with an actual Anglo-Russian treaty but reversed Paul’s estrangement with Austria and Prussia. Friendly all over the place, he began talking with France itself. A peace treaty resulted. Many expressions of personal friendship and admiration ensued.

Napoleon, however, was all strategy, including the friendly noises made toward Russia. He did what he did, much of it detrimental to Russia. Alexander would complain, and there would be more soothing noises from Napoleon. The peace stuff of 1801 lasted until about 1802 or so, when Britain and France began to get ready for the next war which came in 1805, Russia opposed to France. Diplomacy between France and Russia had ceased the previous year over a French political execution of a French noble known to Alexander.

Napoleon won the 1805-07 hostilities. The ensuing treaty negotiations included a veritable blizzard of blandishments by Napoleon, personally, toward Alexander. The personal embodiment of Russia found himself impressed. But he was unable for personal reasons to bring himself to abandon his erstwhile allies Austria and Prussia. Napoleon kept trying but there was that solid core of Alexander that could be described as incorruptible. In the end he would not sell out his ideals, such as they were, nor would he betray what he saw as the interests of his country, nor would he play sidekick. So Franco-Russian relations deteriorated, despite a joint Franco-Russian war against Austria in 1809, until Napoleon finally invaded Russia in 1812. That was the beginning of the end of Napoleon.

Skip to 1815, Napoleon was through, there were conferences amongst the victors to try to figure out what to do. Alexander promoted his idealistic ideas. The dominant line at the time was fronted by the Austrian Minister of State Metternich, who put together a legitimist coalition that settled core European questions like Poland and Germany for a couple of decades, more peace than Europe had ever seen before.

Metternich seems to have thought of himself as a democrat but he served an absolutist emperor with loyalty and genius. He had no use for the brotherhood of man idealism of Alexander. Alexander, for his part, found himself eventually brought around to something approaching Metternich’s view that national interests always trump personals and that “people” are at the service of the state, not the other way round as we are supposed to be doing here.

That was all in his mind however, that liberal mush. He had never governed the least little bit “popularly,” but willfully as he pleased in the traditional Romanov manner. Whatever he did was the right thing because he was the divinely sanctioned emperor. His internal policy was harshly applied in that classic Russian whips and gibbets style that the rest of the world periodically deplores. There was lots of corruption as usual; riots and uprisings all over the place; discontent everywhere. The army, of course, had to be unfairly favored in such political circumstances, but he also annoyed the brass by experimenting with what he called military settlements, essentially slave labor agricultural operations with the peasants also having military obligations. Cradle to grave hereditary obligatory service. Slavery, right? It turned out they couldn’t pay for themselves and they bred many, not a few rebellions that had to be put down at cost. But did Alexander stop? No. He would pave the road to Petersburg with the bones of rebels, the military settlements would continue. Russia in Alexander’s time spent plenty of money on internal security operations.

Alexander’s last chapter was the Greek insurrection starting in 1821. He thought he should be with the Greeks, fellow Orthodox and all, but he had treaty obligations that demanded he be with the Ottomans. He painfully did his duty until 1825 when he left for the south on a “vacation” with his ailing wife. Everyone thought he would gather an army and invade Turkey on behalf of Greece but instead it was put out that he died, age 48. Yet more Russian melodrama rumors immediately began to circulate that he had actually abdicated and disappeared to live as a solitary hermit in Siberia. When the Bolsheviks opened his tomb in 1925 no body was found. You can’t make this stuff up. Reality really is stranger than fiction.

A unique feature of Alexander’s Russian coinage is that they do not refer to him personally in any way. You have to go to Poland to see a portrait of him. Look at the ruble: Paul’s has a bunch of Ps and an invocation of God, Alexander’s says “Russian Government.” Just the denominations found on copper coinage. Could that possibly be some liberal servant-of-the-people thought expressed in that absence? There are numerous portrait patterns. Curious.

The coinage began as a continuation of 18th century modules, though the designs were all completely new. The old machinery was still in use, so the coins have loose-collared spread out 18th century looking planchets. New machinery began to be used with the 1807 rubles and generally from 1810, making modern looking coins with squared off edges to the planchets, flat surfaces, and gridded artwork for enhanced symmetry. Mint records, which had been pretty good since the mid-18th century, became even more reliable.

Old style coinage included copper polushkas (quarter kopeks), which are rare, but beware of modern counterfeits. It also included dengas (half kopeks) and kopeks similarly, 2 kopeks, which are not rare, but these days not easy to find, and 5 kopeks similar and with an added popularity factor because they’re big and tend to be nicely made. Copper mints were Ekaterinburg (EM) and KM mark confusingly used sometimes at Kolyvan/Suzun and elsewhen at Kolpino. Old style silver consisted of 10 kopeks, polupoltinniks (quarter rubles), poltinas (half rubles) and rubles. They’re all very hard to find now, but rarity is only a matter of degree. And the gold 5 and 10 rubles are very rare or very, very rare.

New style coinage put the copper at 2/3 of the old weights, the weights and bullion content of gold and silver were unchanged. Of new style coppers many of the 2 kopeks are very common, kopeks and dengas much less so, no polushkas or copper 5 kopeks were made. Copper mints were Ekaterinburg (most common), Izhora (IM, except 1810 when KM was used with MK mintmaster initials), Kolyvan/Suzun (the rest of the KM coins), and Saint Petersburg (SPB).

New style silver coins were 5, 10, and 20 kopeks, poltinas and rubles. These, in general, were not too hard to find maybe 10 years ago in grades low to reasonable to excellent, all at reasonable prices. Now they are all gone. I have one left, an apparently unpublished overdate that I seem to want too much for. They’re not really rare, Alexandrine silvers are only functionally rare. Demand hopelessly exceeds supply.

Gold is 5 rubles denomination only and are rare. Prices are high.

The Napoleonic period has left a number of military counterfeits and counterfeit Turkish coins are the Russian contribution. The coins were made at St. Petersburg, writes Uzdenikov, 1808-9, a number of different years and types of Turkish 1 kurush coins. Some of them can be distinguished from genuine by the standardized lack of some diacritical marks and a characteristic misspelling of the mint name, others are correct but for different treatment of the design elements. As far as I can recall I’ve never seen one.

The manufacture of fake Dutch ducats, which had been going on big time since the 18th century, continued.

I don’t think I’ve written about the fake Dutch ducats, have I? Dutch ducats were like hundred dollar bills today, – nobody had to ask, “What’s this?” It was just much more convenient, when going abroad, to carry Dutch ducats than local money. Government operatives like ambassadors would go out of country and spend these Dutch ducats. They were good gold and spent by someone with diplomatic immunity, what were they going to do? The Dutch complained of course, but they also didn’t let it get in the way of business. This went on until the mid-19th century. You can find references and Web sites that explain the micro-differences in the Russian versions. I believe I’ve seen one or more offered in some auction.

I didn’t think I’d end up with what they referred to as “a known coin” in their reports. Well, next time we’ll begin with yet another messy succession, another problematic emperor, and the world’s first platinum coins.



Contact Reis by mail at P.O. Box 26303, Raleigh, NC 27611, or by e-mail at reisbiz@earthlink.net.



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