Seven centuries ago, three great principalities flourished in Russia - Smolensk. Ryazan and Tver, in terms of territory and military power, were not inferior to the European kingdoms of the middle hand. Now only the ruins of earthen ramparts and ancient cathedrals remain from these states. By whom and when these principalities were founded, how they developed and why they died, and for what reasons it was Moscow that gathered Russian lands around it, and the reader learns about many other things from the book of the historian A. B. Shirokorad.