at the Gulf of Finland. Her name was written on the side in Cyrillic as Авансь. When Finland declared independence on 6 December 1917, Avance was still under Russian control. After a failed attempt to recapture her in early 1918 she was taken to St. Petersburg by the retreating Russian revolutionaries. The Russians returned her in poor condition in 1922 after Wäinämöinen and Ilmarinen, two former Russian icebreakers captured by the White Guard during the civil war in 1918, had been returned to their previous owners. Unable to pay for the extensive repairs, the shipping company sold Avance to the Board of Navigation for FIM 1.58 million. She was repaired at the Ab Crichton shipyard, who was paid FIM 1.25 million for the work, and on 15 December 1923 her name was translated to Apu, meaning "assistance" in Finnish. After refit Apu resumed her duties on the Archipelago Sea as a state-owned icebreaker and remained in service through the Second World War until 1959 even though during her last years in service her assistance in the Archipelago Sea was described being "more of a moral nature". The 60-year-old icebreaker was decommissioned on 7 April 1959 and broken up shortly afterwards. She was replaced by the second Karhu class icebreaker, Murtaja. In 1969 a new diesel-electric icebreaker was named Apu after the smallest state-owned icebreaker of Finland. The new icebreaker was more than five times as big as the old one by displacement and had almost eight times as much power in her four propellers. Technical details Avance was long overall and at the waterline. Her moulded breadth was and breadth at the waterline slightly smaller, . The draught of the icebreaker at maximum displacement, 900 tons, was on even keel. The ship was powered by a 1,500 ihp triple-expansion steam engine driving a single propeller in the stern and giving Avance a maximum speed of in open water. She had two coal-fired boilers and a smaller auxiliary boiler, all in a single engine room amidships. Her stores could hold 100 tons of coal, which was fed to the boilers at a rate of 1.3 to 1.8 tons per hour when the ship was breaking ice. Like other icebreakers of her time, she was also equipped with sails which, while rarely used, remained in the inventory until the 1920s. In many ways Avance resembled the first state-owned icebreaker of Finland, Murtaja,