Abrenes apriņķis was a county in the Republic of Latvia with an area of 4292 square kilometres that was formed in 1925 from the northern part of the Ludzas apriņķis as the Jaunlatgale (New Latgale) county, but it was renamed to Abrenes apriņķis in 1938. The district included the towns of Balvi and Abrene and 14 villages, and the civil parishes (Latvian: pagasti) comprising the district were reorganized thrice (there were 12 in 1929, 13 in 1935 and 15 in 1940). During World War II, six eastern civil parishes – Purvmalas (Bakovo), Linavas (Linovo), Kacēnu (Kachanovo), Upmalas (Upmala), Gauru (Gavry) and Augšpils (Vyshgorodok), as well as the town of Abrene (a total area of 1293.6 square kilometers with 35,524 inhabitants) – were annexed to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1944. That part of the former Abrene district is now part of Russia as the Pytalovsky District of Pskov Oblast and borders Latvia. "Abrene region" in current usage very often treats the area joined to Russia as though it had comprised the entire district, which can be misleading since nearly three quarters of the former district are in Latvia, but many treatments of the transfer of the eastern pagasti by citing interbellum demographic statistics for the whole region, rather than by civil parish. History The Abrene region was long a point of contact and friction between the Finno-Ugric, Baltic, and Slavic languages, cultures, tribes, and countries. The Russian name for the town and region, Pytalovo, probably derives from the Finno-Ugric tulva, "tributary, flood"; the region was part of Tolowa (or Tholowa; Latvian: Tālava), a kingdom of the northern Latgalians, which for a period paid tribute to Mstislav the Brave of Smolensk (from ca. 1180); the area became part of Livonia in 1224. In the 1270s the area became a part of Livonia. The Balts east of a slight ridge at Viļaka were gradually russified from the 15–16th centuries, but the philologists August Johann Gottfried Bielenstein and Kārlis Mīlenbahs, conducting linguistic field research in the area in the late 19th and early 20th century, found that many people, called "Russian Latvians" by the local Russians, still spoke the High Latvian dialect. After the Bolsheviks were driven from what is now Latvia and Soviet Russia recognized Latvia's independence, in August 1920, the border was not drawn alongside ethnographic lines: once the frontier was negotiated (the border was not finalized until 7