Amid efforts to strengthen its national identity, Ukraine debates renaming its currency to distinguish it from its Russian linguistic counterpart.
It may appear to be petty should a country decide to rename its currency system simply because the language describing the system is too similar to that of a neighboring country. It might be national pride and patriotism rather than being petty when the nation next door is waging war against you.
So is the situation in Ukraine. Ukraine’s kopiykas and Russia’s kopek are basically the same name other than the former being expressed in the Ukrainian language while the latter is expressed in Russian. Considering Russia invaded Ukraine beginning in 2014 and escalated the invasion in 2022, there is no love lost between the two countries.
Russia has forced people living in Russian-occupied portions of Ukraine to use Russian kopeks and rubles. Ukraine’s currency is expressed in kopiykas and hryvnia.
On Sept. 2, National Bank of Ukraine Governor Andriy Pyshnyy said, “Having researched the history of money circulation in Ukraine, we came to an undisputed conclusion that the term kopiika [kopiykas] is actually a symbol of muscovite occupation. The Ukrainian people are taking back everything that was stolen from them and mutilated by Kremlin narratives. It’s time to do justice to the monetary system as well by cleansing Ukraine’s monetary sovereignty of anything even remotely muscovite. We have a specific term of our own – shah – a unique Ukrainian word that refers to small denomination coins.”
Changing the name of the currency has not been done on a whim. National Bank of Ukraine Money Museum Senior Curator Dr. Andrii Boiko-Haharin explained, “We conducted a thorough study of the words that used to denote coins and coin denominations, the specifics of coin and bank note counting practices, and Ukraine’s traditions of wealth accumulation. The evidence we gathered gives us grounds to say with confidence that the Ukrainian name for small coins is shah.
Reintroducing this term into modern monetary circulation is, therefore, logical and scientifically justified. The hryvnia has noble origins, and shah reflects our rich Cossack heritage.”
The NBU released a statement reading, “Modern sociological studies show that the vast majority of Ukrainians are now interested in the history and culture of Ukraine, proud of its state symbols, including the Ukrainian language and national currency. And money is an important symbol of statehood that every Ukrainian holds in their hands daily.”
The Institute of Linguistics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine Deputy Director for Research Oleksandr Skopnenko added, “The name ‘shah’ for a small coin has been known in Ukrainian since the 16th century. The return of this name to the modern Ukrainian currency would not only revive national traditions in the denomination of money but would also forever break the connection between the practice of naming Ukrainian coins and colonial Russian linguistic culture.”
Ylia Shylenko is a graduate student at the National Academy of Management of Culture and Arts, as well as the chief curator of money at the National Taras Shevchenko Museum in Kyiv. Shylenko said, “Specialists of the National Taras Shevchenko Museum have studied the use of names of monetary units in the works of the great Kobzar. [a book of poems by Ukrainian poet and painter Taras Shevchenko]. We found 11 cases using the words ‘shah’ and ‘shazhok’ in his texts, which are used in the sense of an ancient coin. This gives us an idea of the linguistic composition of the Ukrainian language of the second half of the 19th century and confirms the existence of such a monetary unit in the commodity-money relations of that time.”
Ukraine is reaching back to its 17th-century roots, at which time an autonomous hetman state or Hetmanate used a small coin called shah. The Hetmanate was formed following the partition of 1667 and continued until the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921. The Ukrainian Central Council passed a law introducing the hryvnia as the currency for the newly established Ukrainian People’s Republic during the time of the Russian Revolution. The People’s Republic issued state credit vouchers in denominations of 2, 5, 10, 20, 100, 500, and 1000 hryvnias and legislated that there be coins in denominations of 1, 2, 5, 20, and 50 shahs.
Because of economic and technical problems, the coins were never produced. The state treasury printed and issued emergency money stamps in denominations of 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 shahs. The Soviet government withdrew the stamp money in March 1919. The Central Rada of the Ukrainian Peoples Republic issued paper notes in grivna, carboranes, kopek, and ruble denominations in 1918.
Soviet Premier Jozef Stalin ruthlessly repressed Ukrainian nationalism between 1922 and 1939, yet in 1923, the Soviet government gave the region permission to use Ukrainian rather than the Russian language.
The Zentral-notenbank Ukraine issued paper notes for Nazi-occupied Ukraine during The Great Patriotic War, known to most American readers as World War II. The German occupiers rejected ruble-denominated notes from 1941 because of the Russian language on the notes. In 1946, following the war, the Ukrainian Revolutionary Army issued karbovanez-denominated paper notes.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the establishment of the modern independent nation of Ukraine in 1991, a currency system needed to be free of the re-invented Central Bank of the Russian Federation. Ukraine initially used Commonwealth of Independent States notes issued by the Bank of Russia, but these became worthless due to inflation. Ukraine President Leonid Kravchuck would later call the suggestion of a common ruble currency with Russia “fiction.”
Sample shah-denominated coins were produced at the Luhansk Machine-Building Plant in 1992. However, the Presidium of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine approved the name Kopiika.
A May 8, 1994, Wall Street Journal newspaper article reported, “Ukraine introduced its first domestically produced coin in centuries, a commemorative piece to mark the Allied victory in World War II. Since the USSR collapsed, the former Soviet republic hasn’t had any coins, and thus calls from public phones in Ukrainian cities are free.”