Prime Minister's Office (Finland)
The Senate of Finland was founded on 18 August 1809 in the Grand Duchy of Finland when Emperor Alexander I of Russia signed a standing order on its establishment at Peterhof Palace. The Senate was initially called the Governing Council until it was renamed as the Senate in 1816. The Senate of Finland was divided into the Economic and Judicial Divisions; the Economic Division was further divided into departments, such as the Office Administrative Department (; ). On 1 October 1892, the Office Administrative Department was disbanded and the modern equivalent position of Prime Minister in the Senate, the Vice-Chairman of the Economic Division, was granted a support office in its place. The new unit was called the Office of the Economic Division (; ). Following Finnish independence in 1917, the unit was renamed as the Prime Minister's Office on 27 November 1918 with the operations and staff remaining intact.
Politics of Finland
The Grand Duchy's relationship with St. Petersburg began to deteriorate in the 1890s. The nervousness of tsarist officials about Finnish loyalty in wartime prompted measures to bind Finland more closely to the empire. The campaign of "Russification" ended only with Finland's independence in 1917. In retrospect, the campaign can be seen as a failure, but for several decades it caused much turmoil within Finland, reaching its most extreme point with the assassination of the governor general in 1904. The first Russian revolution, that of 1905, allowed Finns to discard their antiquated Diet and to replace it with a unicameral legislature, the Eduskunta, elected through universal suffrage. Finland became the first European nation in which women had the franchise. The first national election, that of 1907, yielded Europe's largest social democratic parliamentary faction. In a single step, Finland went from being one of Europe's most politically backward countries to being one of its most advanced. Nonetheless, frequent dissolutions at the hands of the tsar permitted the Eduskunta to achieve little before independence.