There were so many best moments over the course of the decades that it is impossible to single out just the one. What comes to mind are many mornings when it felt great to get back to your study room and begin some completely new research topic or continue with an old one. It was a real privilege to be in a job where you could decide that morning what the task of the day would be. There were many such days, especially in the old Renvall Institute.

In the old ‘Doc’ Department (Institute for Historical Research and Documentation) there was real academic freedom in the best sense of the word. It was felt also at the coffee table, where there was a smarter group which always pursued the matter. There was no time wasted on gossip, we only talked about major issues of the past and posted interesting news and documents on the bulletin board. The atmosphere was an antidote to the time of narrow-mindedness and politicisation, and it also taught independent and critical thinking in that regard. The roles of Osmo Jussila and Tauno Huotari were especially important for the whole institution, not to mention Eino Lyytinen, Markku Henriksson, Kristiina Graae, Hannes Saarinen, Rauno Endén and others.

And the students were made to feel welcome: the seminar library (‘The Russian Room’) was developed into a living space where you could study for the tests, drink coffee and get to know others who were interested in the same things as you. You could even smoke that singularly potent form of tobacco, Nicotiana rustica (Rus. mahorkka), to create the right atmosphere. We tried to form the best possible relationship with Russians, our research topic, and pulled them into the Russian language ‘Russki kruzhok’ seminar, which still meets every Wednesday.

After office hours, we often got together in our free time in the city or on the institute’s premises and continued any discussion that was left unfinished in the seminars. I think that this was a very necessary institution and it contributed to the emergence and development of very significant research networks.