page_title: Jääkarhu
section_title: Early career
hierarchical_section_title: Jääkarhu / Career / Early career
caption_attribution_description: English: Finnish icebreaker Jääkarhu in the port of Hanko in the 1920s. Converted to black and white from the original file.
context_page_description: Jääkarhu was a Finnish and later Soviet steam-powered icebreaker. Built in 1926 by P. Smit Jr. Shipbuilding and Machine Factory in Rotterdam, Netherlands, she was the last and largest steam-powered state-owned icebreaker of Finland. After two decades of successful service, Jääkarhu was handed over to the Soviet Union as war reparation in 1945 and renamed Sibiryakov. She remained in service until the 1970s and was broken up in 1972.
context_section_description: Jääkarhu left Rotterdam on 3 March 1926. When the new icebreaker arrived in Finland on 7 March, she was welcomed by a number of icebound ships outside Utö. After Sampo had arrived from Hanko with the Minister of Commerce and Industry, Tyko Reinikka, other representatives of the state, and members of the press, the newest and largest state-owned icebreaker demonstrated her power by easily overcoming the notorious pack ice fields surrounding the island and escorting a convoy of three merchant ships to the open seas. After spending her first winter escorting ships in the Gulf of Finland, Jääkarhu arrived in Helsinki on 27 April 1926. In July she was drydocked in Liepāja, Latvia, where her bottom was repainted.
  In 1926, Jääkarhu became the first Finnish icebreaker to adopt Finnish as the command language. Since the officers and most of the crew spoke Swedish as their first language, this resulted in negative comments from the Swedish-speaking minority, which considered Finnish to be "the language of the peasants", and even concerns about the safety of navigation. Captain Juho Lehtonen, who had replaced Rosqvist in July 1926, even received hate mail from Swedish-speaking citizens, some of whom questioned his professional competence after a minor collision with a Swedish steamer Yrsa on 18 January 1927.
  With the exception of the winter of 1929, the winters from 1927 until 1939 were relatively mild. Since Jääkarhu was the most expensive to operate among the Finnish state-owned icebreakers, she saw little action during these years as she was always the last icebreaker to leave, beginning her season Helsinki and then moving to Hanko, and the first one to return. During very mild winters she was not put into service at all.
  However, the winter of 1929 was extremely difficult and by February the Baltic Sea was covered by ice all the way to the Danish straits. Finnish, Swedish and Soviet icebreakers were sent to escort merchant ships through the straits, and on 22 February 1929 Jääkarhu was ordered to head south with a convoy of ships carrying export goods, assist and escort any icebound ship along the way and return with an inbound convoy to Turku and Hanko. She left on 24 February with a convoy of 12 ships and arrived at the edge of ice near Copenhagen on 4 March. After spending a few days assisting ships in the southern Baltic Sea, Jääkarhu began her journey home on 8 March and arrived in Hanko on 12 March. During the past 15 days she had, in addition to the ships in her own convoys, released and assisted 24 other ships and sailed 2,140 nautical miles (3,960 km; 2,460 mi).
caption: Jääkarhu in the port of Hanko.
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