My last additions for this month:
There are different fantastic versions of the reasons of minting special coins for Siberia. But the most common and official version is that it was needed to utilize copper that was too expensive to be transported, but as Siberian that copper contained some gold and silver, the weight of the coin shall be lower comparing to other Russian coins.
He was the first, and most successful, of three "pretenders" who claimed during the Time of Troubles to be the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible, tsarevich Dmitry Ivanovich, who supposedly escaped a 1591 assassination attempt when he was eight years old. It is generally believed that the real Dmitry of Uglich died in Uglich in 1591. False Dmitry claimed that his mother, Maria Nagaya, anticipated the assassination attempt ordered by Boris Godunov and helped him escape to a monastery in the Tsardom of Russia, and the assassins killed somebody else instead. He said he fled to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth after he came to the attention of Boris Godunov, who ordered him seized.
With the support of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, False Dmitry invaded the Russian Empire in 1605, but the war ended with the sudden death of Boris Godunov. Disaffected Russian boyars staged a coup against the new tsar, Feodor II. False Dmitry entered Moscow on 21 July 1605, and was crowned tsar. Maria Nagaya accepted him as her son and "confirmed" his story. False Dmitry's reign was marked by his openness to Catholicism and allowing foreigners into Russia. This made him unpopular with the boyars, who staged a successful coup and killed him eleven months after he took the throne. His wife of 10 days, Marina, would later "accept" False Dmitry II as her fallen husband.
He was Tsar of all Russia from 1606 to 1610, after the murder of False Dmitri I. His rule coincided with the Time of Troubles.
Shuisky recognized the previous pretender as the "real" Dmitry, despite having earlier determined that the boy had committed suicide. But later he turned against the false Dmitry and brought about his death (in May 1606) by stating that the real Dmitry had indeed been slain and that the reigning tsar Dmitriy (False Dmitriy I) was an impostor. After Dmitriy's death, Shuisky's adherents proclaimed him tsar, on 19 May 1606. He reigned until 19 July 1610, but was never generally recognized. Even in Moscow itself he had little or no authority, and he only avoided deposition by the dominant boyars because they had no one to replace him with
Also updated some pictures at Numista catalogue:)
