This article explores the temporalities experienced by persons aged 70 years and over during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland. Although the temporalities of the pandemic have been analysed from multiple perspectives, we contribute to this line of research in two ways. First, we show how deeply the pandemic affected older people's experiences of temporality. Second, we further develop the concept of forced present to highlight the consequences that the restriction measures had on older persons’ situations and perceptions of temporality. More specifically, we asked the following question: How did older people perceive time (past, present and future) during the pandemic? We used thematic analysis to examine a dataset consisting of written letters (N = 77) collected between April and June 2020. The findings showed that social isolation forced older people to live in the present without being able to plan their near future because they had no knowledge of when they would be ‘free’ again, which made some participants feel anxious and depressed. Furthermore, we found that the present became intertwined with the personal past as well as with the collective past, as evidenced by participants’ descriptions of war, previous pandemics and hardships. This article deepens our understanding of older people's everyday lives during the pandemic and highlights the problematic nature of social isolation of older people as a safety measure. Overall, this article reveals the particularity of older people's experiences in unequal pandemic times and the ageism inherent in the restriction measures.

Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) including high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) and analytical electron microscopy (AEM) were used to study the fine clay fraction (<0.1 μm) from the eluvial E horizon of podzols located in central Finland that had developed from till materials. Soils of increasing age (6500-9850 y BP) were selected to represent a chronosequence of soil development. Expandable phyllosilicates (vermiculite, smectites) are formed in the eluvial E horizon of podzols in a short time (6500 y). TEM observations show that dissolution and physical-breakdown processes affect the clay particles. As the age of the soils increases, fragmentation and exfoliation of large precursor minerals lead to thinner clay particles of two to three layers thick. The chemical compositions of individual particles obtained by AEM indicate that expandable phyllosilicates from the E horizon of podzols are heterogeneous, involving a mixture of vermiculite, Mg-bearing smectites, and aluminous beidellite. Results suggest that heterogeneity is related to the nature of their precursors. Vermiculite and Mg-bearing smectites are derived from biotite and chlorite weathering whereas phengitic micas alter to aluminous beidellite. Because the transformation of biotite and chlorite is more rapid than phengitic micas, biotite and chlorite contributes predominantly to smectites in the younger soils, as long as ferromagnesian phyllosilicates are present in the E horizons. If not, a larger proportion of smectites is derived from phengitic micas in the older soils. Direct measurement of d(001 ) values on lattice fringe images from alkylammonium-saturated samples shows that interlayer charge varies from high-charge expandable minerals (0.6–0.75 per half unit cell) in the younger soils to 0.5–0.6 per half unit cell in the oldest soils. Thus, the proportion of the components in the clay assemblage, as well as their chemistry and interlayer charge, change over time with soil evolution.

In this article, we investigate the reasons behind the puzzling enthusiastic reception of a book about Finland’s national development by Turkish nationalist intellectuals in the early Republic of Turkey. Published in Turkish in 1928, the developmental model laid out in Petrov’s The Country of White Lilies resonated with the Turkish intelligentsia and has remained a popular book in Turkey throughout the twentieth century, and even today. First, we compare the fictionalized developmental model presented by Petrov in his book with Finnish development under the Russian Empire, before its independence in 1917. Second, we show that this reception was largely based on a comparison of Turkey and Finland’s geopolitical positions in global imperial politics, and a constructed racial affinity between the two nations in the minds of Turkish readers. Third, we argue that this national developmental model served three ideological purposes; distancing the Turkish Republic from the Ottoman Empire, showing the developmental capacity of nations outside the linear and paternalistic developmental model proposed by Western European empires, and last, presenting a model that glosses over Ottoman-Turkish state violence and ethnic cleansing, as well as democratic processes, as irrelevant to considerations of progress and development. Finally, we discuss the implications of our study for re-evaluating the sociological literature on nation formation, largely taking its “model cases” (Krause 2021) from the Western European experience, through a more encompassing inter-imperial approach (Doyle 2014).

Historical research on urban epidemics has focused on the interaction of diseases with social and spatial gradients, such as class, ethnicity, or neighborhood. Even sophisticated historical studies usually lack data on health-related behavior or health-related perceptions, which modern analysts tend to emphasize. With detailed source material from the Finnish city of Tampere during a typhoid epidemic in 1916, we are able to combine both dimensions and look at how material and social constraints interacted with behavior and knowledge to produce unequal outcomes. We use data on socioeconomic status, location, and physical habitat as well as the self-reported behavior and expressed understandings of transmission mechanisms of the infected people to identify the determinants of some falling ill earlier or later than others. Applying survival analysis to approximately 2,500 cases, we show that disease avoidance behavior was deficient and constrained by physical habitat, regardless of considerable public health campaigning. Behavioral guidelines issued by authorities were sub-optimally communicated, unrealistic, and inadequately followed. Boiling water was hampered by shared kitchens, and access to laundry houses for additional hygiene was uneven. Centralized chemical water purification finally leveled the playing field by socializing the cost of prevention and eliminating key sources of unequal risk.

This article explores the political trajectories of the early twentieth-century Grand Duchy of Finland and the Kingdom of Poland in the context of the “global parliamentary moment,” when the constitutional script of revolution competed with the more daring script of social revolution. We scrutinize contrastive political choices of socialist parties in these two western borderlands of the Russian Empire. Finland and Poland emerged as independent parliamentary states in 1917–1918 but under manifestly different circumstances. The Finnish socialist party had enjoyed a stable foothold in the formally democratic but practically impotent national parliament since 1907, whereas the Polish socialists boycotted the Russian Duma and envisioned a democratic legislature as a guaranty of a Poland with true people’s power. The Finnish socialists later abandoned parliamentarism in favor of an armed revolution, in 1918, whereas most of their Polish counterparts used the parliamentary ideal of popular sovereignty to restrain the revolutionary upsurge. We argue that the socialist understandings of parliamentarism and revolution were of crucial importance at this juncture. We draw from a broad corpora of political press reports, handwritten newspapers, and leaflets to show how the diachronic sequence of events and synchronic power relations inside the Russian Empire made certain stances toward parliamentarism and revolution more likely at different points in time.

Rare organic artefacts, including wooden figurines and fishnet fragments from the Stone Age (c. 6000–2000 BC) were found in 2020 and 2021 during excavations of a wetland site in Finland. The first results from analysing the artefacts, crafting methods and raw materials provide novel insights into artisanship, material know-how and visual culture of northern hunter-fisher-gatherers.

We examine financial literacy in Finland and its connection with various financial outcomes using novel survey data collected in 2023. While the overall Finnish financial literacy level is about average among the OECD countries, there is significant heterogeneity within the population. Women have lower financial literacy than men. The young and the old have lower financial literacy than respondents in their prime working age, and entrepreneurs have higher financial literacy than other groups. Financial literacy is also correlated with higher educational levels. We further study the relationship between financial literacy and a number of economic outcome variables. We find financial literacy to be negatively related to coping with a major expense, facing an income shock, and with perceived over-indebtedness. However, we do not find a statistically significant relationship between financial literacy and retirement planning in Finland.

This paper provides an overview of the development and the sociopolitical background of legislation pertaining to abortion in Finland from the nineteenth century to the current day. The first Abortion Act came to force in 1950. Before that, abortions were handled under criminal law. The 1950 law was restrictive and allowed abortions in very limited circumstances only. Its main aim was to reduce the number of abortions and especially illegal abortions. It was not very successful in reaching these goals, but, significantly, it moved abortions from the realm of the criminal law to the hands of medical professionals. The birth of the welfare state and the prenatal attitudes of 1930s and 1940s Europe played their part in shaping the law. By late 1960s, with the rise of the women’s rights movement and other changes in society, there was pressure to change the outdated law. The new 1970 Abortion Act was broader and allowed abortions for limited social reasons too but left very limited, if any, room for a woman’s right to choose. After a citizen’s initiative in 2020, the year 2023 will see a significant amendment to the 1970 law; during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, an abortion can be performed on the woman’s request alone. However, there is still a long way to go in terms of women’s rights and abortion laws in Finland.

Economic grievances, globalization, and voter discontent are among the usual explanations for the surge in right-wing populism (RWP) across Western democracies. However, subjective well-being has recently been introduced as an overlooked psychological factor explaining citizens’ democratic support, immigration attitudes, and populist vote choice. Yet we know little about how general well-being, instead of specific negative sentiments, relates to populist and nativist attitudes. This study examines the well-being bases of populist and nativist attitudes in Finland where, similar to other European countries, populism and anti-immigration attitudes have increased since the early 2000’s. Using the Finnish 2019 National Election Study, we demonstrate that life dissatisfaction, and not only economic concerns, relates to populist attitudes, setting an agenda for future populism research. We suggest that past research has not fully accounted for all psychological factors in explaining support for RWP.