9-year-old Juha-Matti Kinnunen felt that he had been wronged. A group of boys had been shoplifting something from a kiosk, maybe sweets, and one of them had been caught. He had told the adults who else had been involved.
So he had snitched, Juha-Matti thought.
Shoplifting was wrong, he knew that. But getting caught was not his fault. That was why he felt that, in fact, he was the one who had been treated unfairly.
The adults tried to deal with the matter the way adults deal with such things. It was discussed at school. The police may have come by too. They had to go to the kiosk to apologize. At home, Juha-Matti was supposed to tell what had happened.
He did not tell.
A fairly ordinary childhood
Juha-Matti lived, in his own words, “a fairly ordinary” childhood in Tutjunniemi, Liperi. At some point his parents divorced, but he does not see that as the reason why his life later went down a bad path. Looking back, the course of his life appears as the sum of many things.
In lower secondary school there was an invisible hierarchy that everyone knew, unwritten rules. Some people were more acceptable to bully than others. If you wanted to belong to the others, you had to look tough.
The role of the tough guy included cigarettes, fights, detentions and general scrapping. Intoxicants came into the picture gradually. The shoplifting did not stop, but the next time Juha-Matti was caught for it was not until adulthood.
> Who had decided how fast a moped was allowed to go? Why was the upper limit exactly 45 kilometres per hour and not, say, 55 km/h?
In lower secondary school, his grade average hovered between six and seven, and only history and social studies interested him. Juha-Matti remembers pondering things even then, though from a very practical point of view. Who had decided how fast a moped was allowed to go? Why was the upper limit exactly 45 kilometres per hour and not, say, 55 km/h?
Otherwise, school did not feel like his thing. Juha-Matti says he was not a student who would have gained respect through grades. So he used the means his environment offered. The most important thing was to be tough enough so that others would not eat you alive.
As an adult, Juha-Matti has also received an ADHD diagnosis.
He does not think that his environment or ADHD removes his responsibility for what he did then and later. But he wonders whether life would have gone differently if the environment had been different, or if ADHD had been recognized earlier. Maybe school could have gone better. Maybe his grade average would have risen enough for more doors to open.
That did not happen. After comprehensive school, Juha-Matti went to Pieksämäki to study to become a vehicle mechanic. Machines and mopeds interested him. He had already tinkered with them when he was young and read the vocational school textbooks in advance during the summer holiday.
But the same problems that had followed him in comprehensive school followed him into vocational school. There were again people who tried to act tough. There was again an environment where you had to know how to stand up for yourself. Intoxicants were used more. In the dormitory they drank and slept until midday, and eventually he was thrown out. After that, Juha-Matti marched to the principal and announced that he was quitting school altogether.
Freedom got out of hand
School no longer gave rhythm to his days. With a poor grade average, he could not get into the schools he might have wanted. Still, he had to apply again and again, even though Juha-Matti knew in advance that he would not be chosen.
He lived for a while with his father, but gradually moved out on his own. When no one was telling him anymore when he had to go to school, wake up or be somewhere, freedom quickly turned into recklessness.
Juha-Matti describes that time by saying that things got completely out of hand.
They drank, fought, stole. They drove “sideways” on winter nights in rear-wheel-drive cars. Speeds climbed into the hundreds in areas where they should have been driving thirty. They did things that, looking back, made no sense at all.
> Networks were formed, but they were a different kind of networks than the ones used to get summer jobs or get into job interviews.
Juha-Matti was not alone, however. He had friends, acquaintances, semi-acquaintances and trading partners. He says he had always been social and got to know people easily. Networks were formed, but they were a different kind of networks than the ones used to get summer jobs or get into job interviews.
In these networks people knew who sold what, who owed money to whom, who was going to prison and who was coming out. Someone got work from time to time, someone took out payday loans, someone committed crimes. Money came from social security, trading and crime.
From society’s point of view, Juha-Matti became marginalized, but from his own point of view he was not detached from everything, he was connected to a group. That group just kept pulling him deeper into the underworld, and leaving it became harder with every passing year.
Intoxicants were an essential part of that world. First alcohol, then medicines and mixed use. Benzos, opioid-based medicines, anything that could make the feeling numb for a while.
Juha-Matti says that substance use did not take away his ability to function completely. Rather, it enabled him to function. The bad feeling faded. The pangs of conscience became quieter. It was easier to do things that, sober, he might have stopped to think about.
A constant threat hanging over him
Juha-Matti describes that time as being constantly on edge. You never knew when the police would come through the door, when someone would ambush you, or when something said to the wrong person would become “a matter of life and death”. When you have enemies, you have to stay alert, read situations. And above all, be ready to react.
Looking back, Juha-Matti thinks that in exactly that kind of world, ADHD may even be useful. When life is uncertain, risky and full of stimuli, a constant state of readiness fits it. A young person’s brain seeks stimulation anyway, and ADHD multiplies the need for stimulation.
In a different environment, the same traits, such as a vivid imagination and the ability to come up with new things, might perhaps have led toward something better. On the dark side of a small town, they only led deeper into intoxicants and crime.
Juha-Matti does not gloss over what he did. He talks about property crimes, frauds, shoplifting and violence. Once he hit another man over the head with a beer bottle. There was so much blood that the situation frightened even him.
For that he received a suspended prison sentence and compensation to pay. He says the punishment was right. The victim received his compensation, and Juha-Matti is still paying the debt to the insurance company.
Today he is ashamed of his actions.
Still, he also sees the societal side of the matter. He had not consciously decided to place himself on the margins of society.
Trust had disappeared little by little. That is, trust in society, in the idea that anyone could help. Or that there could be anything else on offer than the world he was already in. Juha-Matti remembers that at the time he carried a strong sense of injustice. Even though he had the thought in his mind that he should get away from that way of life, all doors closed. Debts, lost credit records, lack of education and a criminal background followed him.
At the same time, he began to feel that immigrants were getting all the help that he himself was not getting.
In 2015, many asylum seekers came to Europe, and the discussion around immigration exploded. Juha-Matti had already been writing about immigration on social media before that. He thought of himself as immigration-critical, not racist.
Juha-Matti was asked to join when a Soldiers of Odin street patrol was founded in Joensuu. He went along, and in Joensuu he became the second founding member and one of the most central faces of the activity.
The stuff of foolish boys
Outwardly, the activity of Soldiers of Odin was ordinary. They gathered, walked around town, talked with people and then dispersed. Juha-Matti says that on his walks around Joensuu, no violence took place.
He also remembers that not everyone reacted negatively. The police mostly checked that nothing illegal had been done. People came to talk and said it was good that someone was keeping an eye on things. Others said directly that the Nazis could go to hell.
The word “Nazi” felt wrong to Juha-Matti. He did not see himself as a Nazi, nor did he think he was involved in any Nazi ideology. According to him, the Joensuu group was not a continuation of the old skinhead culture, but more of a vague coalition in which anti-immigration views, circles of friends, old networks and the need to do something were mixed together.
But there were also people involved whose hatred went much further than he understood at the time.
Juha-Matti says he began to see that for everyone, it was not about protecting women and children or a general sense of safety. For some, it was about getting to attack immigrants. Admiration of violence began to appear, brass knuckles, videos glorifying killing.
What especially frightened him later was the nature of the hatred. He says he himself did not hate immigrants simply because they were immigrants. But he saw that kind of hatred. Hatred for which it was enough that a person belonged to a group defined as wrong. Hatred that expanded from immigrants to other minorities, such as sexual minorities, disabled people and everyone who did not fit inside one’s own worldview.
> First a sentence sounds harsh, then it sounds ordinary, and finally it begins to sound self-evident.
Juha-Matti describes radicalization as a slow movement. A person does not go to bed in the evening as an ordinary person and wake up in the morning ready for extremist thinking. The thought shifts a little at a time. First a sentence sounds too harsh, then it sounds ordinary, and finally it begins to sound self-evident.
In Joensuu, the activity received a great deal of attention. Interview requests came from abroad too, all the way from Al Jazeera. He had not known to expect anything like that. The idea had been that the group would walk around a bit and then drink beer. Suddenly he was part of an international news phenomenon.
At its core, however, the whole thing was about “the stuff of foolish boys”.
Ordinary life was not waiting
Juha-Matti does not want to give details about why his time in Soldiers of Odin ended. According to him, there was no longer room for his more moderate line. When he left, the activity in Joensuu also began to fade.
Again, Juha-Matti was left with nothing to stand on. Leaving criminal circles or extremist movements is easily imagined as something where a person simply stops, walks away and returns to ordinary life. Juha-Matti had no ordinary life waiting for him, and his previous way of life no longer tempted him. It had started to feel meaningless.
Because something had changed. Juha-Matti began to think that if he wanted to influence things that mattered to him, he had to make a choice. Either continue as before, or try to live the kind of life where he could influence things in other ways than through street patrols or crime.
Feedback also had an effect. So many people had said that what Juha-Matti was doing was not ok that he inevitably began to think about it. Maybe there really had been something wrong with his own actions.
At the same time, belief in various conspiracy theories had begun to crumble. He had to start rebuilding his own thinking. The desire to influence things had not disappeared, however. Now Juha-Matti simply began to wonder whether it might still be better to play by the rules.
He moved from Joensuu to Eno and spent some time in his own peace. He met his current spouse. At times he lived in Joensuu again, but the city no longer seemed to offer him anything.
In Eno, Juha-Matti briefly found his way into a different kind of community. He was involved with a flea market and the village association, first as an active organizer and eventually as vice-chair. It was one of his first experiences of the idea that there might be a place for him in ordinary society too.
He also tried to build a new direction through work and entrepreneurship. Juha-Matti completed a vocational qualification for entrepreneurs and planned to grow edible mushrooms, but the business did not get started. There was nowhere to get capital from. For a person with no credit and debts, even getting started was difficult.
At times he still had experiences of being able to succeed. One summer he ran a flea market and multiplied its sales.
Later, Juha-Matti moved to Uimaharju. He describes it as a place where there was nothing. No car, no job, girlfriend in Joensuu, cats at home and a lot of time to think about what next.
In vocational rehabilitation, they began to look into what direction he could take. In various career choice exercises, fields related to nature and agriculture came up, but they did not feel realistic. Eventually, social and health care stood out among the options. There seemed to be work there.
Juha-Matti applied to study as a practical nurse in Lieksa. He did not want to go straight into apprenticeship training, because he had no experience of the field and did not want to do work he did not yet understand anything about. In the aptitude tests, he scored well.
The studies began promisingly, but soon there was another halt. No internship placement could be found, and without an internship the studies did not progress as they should have. Juha-Matti once again felt that a door had closed just when it had been about to open.
He moved to Kuopio because he wanted to specialize in mental health and substance abuse work. After Joensuu and Uimaharju, Kuopio felt like a place where there was movement, possibilities and services. He started his studies again and got an internship at Sirkkulanpuisto’s day centre Rubla. There, the work finally felt like his own.
Then his body put a stop to it.
Many new chances
At the end of November 2025, Juha-Matti felt unwell. He was short of breath, sweating, dizzy. The emergency clinic said he should come in if his head started to hurt. When Juha-Matti lay down on the sofa, his head felt like it was about to split apart.
On the way to the emergency clinic, chest pain began. At the clinic, they suspected a heart attack. Eventually, tests showed that there was a problem in the heart suggesting heart failure.
It felt as if the ground had fallen out from under his life once again.
Now Juha-Matti is on rehabilitation allowance and is trying to continue his studies on the terms set by his health. He goes swimming and gradually rebuilds his fitness. He does not plan the future very far ahead, but hopes that his studies will continue normally in the autumn.
At the same time, Juha-Matti has found a new way to be involved in society. He writes a lot on social media and has become involved in party politics. In the spring he organized the You Spoke Through Actions demonstration, which spread to several cities. The desire to influence things has found new channels.
One channel is writing a column for Uusi kuopiolainen.
Juha-Matti says he has been given many new chances in his life. Now he knows how to use them more wisely than before.