In December, the Institute will organise the first graduate school course on Russian foreign policy for postgraduate students from the Alek-santeri Institute of the University of Helsinki. During the Christmas Season, the Institute will arrange a concert of Christmas carols on St Lucia Day and a traditional Finnish Christmas celebration for schoolchildren in St Petersburg. He is very famous in Russia, but hardly known at all in Finland. One ongoing joint project is a multinational paper art workshop jointly arranged with the Porvoo Paper Art Centre. The workshop will operate for a few months at the Peter and Paul Fortress.
Most participants come from Finland and Russia but there is one from Mexico and one from Austria.
The Institute has plans for arranging a symposium dealing with the drinking culture in Finland and Russia next year, with Jussi Simpura from the Helsinki University Department of Sociology as a guest speaker. The drinking traditions are very similar in both countries. People used to drink large quantities of hard liquor, in fact more than is good for them, but less frequently, whereas now they drink more frequently but the drinks are not as strong. One project is to present Finnish poetry in the St Petersburg underground. In the autumn English and German poetry was on show in underground cars both in the original and in translation.