The ruble was the world's first decimal currency, thanks to Peter the Great
In 1704 Peter the Great decreed that one silver ruble would be worth 100 copper kopecks instead of the old 200 small Moscow coins. That tidy change made the ruble the first decimal currency anywhere, and Europe's first as well. Only British sterling has been in continuous use for longer.
The ruble began as a weight of silver rather than a coin. Its name most likely comes from the Russian verb for chopping, though scholars disagree about what was chopped. One view holds that a silver bar of one grivna was cut into four rubles; another, backed by a 13th-century Novgorod birch-bark letter, treats ruble and grivna as the same 204 grams of silver, named for some cutting step in casting. A popular link to the Indian rupee is probably wrong. Chronicles first mention the ruble as a unit of account under the year 1316.
Kopecks have their own story. The Novgorod coin showed a rider holding a spear, kop'yo in Russian, and that image gave the coin its name. By 1535 an accounting ruble equalled 100 Novgorod coins or 200 lighter Moscow ones. Tsar Alexis tried in 1654 to strike silver rubles from imported joachimsthalers that were lighter than the official weight; counterfeiting and inflation followed, and after the Copper Riot of 1662 the reform was abandoned.
Over the centuries the ruble kept shrinking in silver. Russia even issued platinum coins between 1828 and 1845, and a gold ruble pegged to the French franc lasted until the First World War shattered it. A curiosity from 1825, the Constantine ruble, was prepared for an emperor who never reigned and never circulated; the world only learned of it in 1857.
The Soviet ruble took over in 1922 and carried denominations printed in all 15 republics' languages. After 1991 it gave way to the Russian ruble, which was redenominated in 1998 at 1,000 old rubles to one new, shortly before a financial crisis. English still cannot decide between ruble and rouble, the latter perhaps kept partly to avoid confusion with rubble.
Source: Russian ruble
