I am sincerely grateful that I only had relatively few administrative duties. Of course, someone has to take care of those things and there is no point in grumbling if you don’t do it yourself. But for some reason I have always seen meetings and bureaucracy as a negative thing and I think that every bureaucrat’s duty should be to understand that they are in principle unnecessary and even harmful – the institutions that is, not the people.

The best meetings that I took part in were with Osmo Jussila, who often managed to get through the agenda in a quarter of an hour and in my opinion still did not leave anything of substance undone.  

I had quite a lot of involvement in international relations, especially with the Russians. These duties were related to historical research symposiums, as well as organising seminars and research collaboration. There was a remarkable amount of these activities from the 1960s on, which is probably hard to understand today, and I was involved in them in the 1970s and beyond. My work with the Scientific and Technical Co-operation Committee Working Group consisted of translating, organising and even interpreting.

My projects were always in collaboration with our Russian partners and I remember that the co-operation always went well. In my work as a director of the Finnish Institute in St Petersburg, the old network was exceedingly helpful and I can say that during my time the institute enjoyed popularity among the St Petersburg intelligentsia, especially scholars.

To some extent, I also participated in research and teacher exchanges and lectures at the University of Petrozavodsk. The diligence and enthusiasm of students at that place made an impression on me.

In addition to the international exchanges with Russia there were of course ones with the West, especially with departments in London and Paris. I should also mention the United States, a superpower in the field, although I only went to conferences there a couple of times. We certainly got outstandingly capable research guests to pay return visits.