Finnish parliamentary election, 1916とは 意味・読み方・使い方

The Finnish Parliament had not been in session during the early years of World War I. The workers´and tenant farmers´discontent with their social and economic problems (the workers still had to work an average of ten hours per day, and the tenant farmers still rented their lands from the landowning peasants, and they could be expelled from those lands if they did not fulfill their contracts´quite strict conditions) was growing. The Russian army´s severe losses to the German army started to awaken among the Finns the hope that they could get back their self-government. The Russian government´s plan to totally unify (Russify) Finland had leaked to several Finnish newspapers in 1914, and had been heavily criticized. Its implementation had been suspended for the duration of World War I. The Social Democrats managed to win their first and so far only parliamentary majority in the Finnish elections by promising more effectively than the bourgeois parties to help the poor and underprivileged people among the Finns (see, for example, Seppo Zetterberg et al., eds., A Small Giant of the Finnish History / Suomen historian pikkujattilainen, Helsinki: WSOY, 2003; Allan Tiitta and Seppo Zetterberg, eds., Finland Through the Ages / Suomi kautta aikojen, Helsinki: Reader´s Digest Ltd., 1992).