On 12 October 1945, the name Viļaka entered the administrative map as a scar left by postwar borders. A year after Abrene and six parishes had been handed over to the Russian SFSR, the remaining part of the former Abrene district was renamed Viļaka district. Behind that dry formula stood about 1,202.4 square kilometres of lost territory—a strip 80 kilometres long and 10 to 25 kilometres wide, where place names, documents, and people’s belonging were cut through by Soviet power.

The Abrene region question is one of the most painful episodes in Latvia’s twentieth-century border history. The 1945 renaming fixed the new Soviet administrative reality in eastern Latvia, turning territorial loss into administrative names and maps.