The Tver region, which lies two hundred kilometers to the north of Moscow invthe direction of St. Petersburg, was the capital of a powerful medieval state. In 1246, Alexander Nevsky entrusted it to his brother Yaroslav Yaroslavich, and very soon this dynasty transformed an inhospitable and uncultivated land into one of Russia's wealthiest and most populous states. The ensuing two-hundred-year battle for supremacy between Tver and Moscow is a much-visited historical subject. The Volga runs through the city of Tver and continues southward to Yaroslav, Nizhniy Novgorod, Saratov, Volgograd (former Stalingrad), and Astrachan, where it enters the Caspian Sea. One small town in the region, Kostinovo, has found its way into the papers because it now has just one inhabitant, Antonina Makarova, age seventy-eight. Her nearest neighbor, Maria Belkova, lives in the next town, which has a population of two. As reported in the St. Petersburg Times of October 2006 by Kim Murphy, the number of inhabitants in the region has decreased by about 250,000 since 1989, and deaths exceed births by two to one. Kostinovo is one of the 1,400 towns in the Tver region that have been officially declared "depopulated" (nezhiloe).
