Anatoly Yuryevich Moskvin - a Russian former linguist, philologist, and historian from Nizhny Novgorod who was arrested in 2011 after the mummified bodies of 26 girls and women between the ages of three and 29 were discovered in his apartment. After exhuming the bodies from local cemeteries, Moskvin mummified the bodies himself before dressing and posing them around his home. Moskvin's parents, who shared the apartment with him, knew of the mummies but mistook them for large dolls.
A former lecturer in Celtic studies at Nizhny Novgorod Linguistic University, Moskvin previously worked at the Institute of Foreign Languages. A philologist, linguist and polyglot who speaks thirteen languages, he has written several books, papers and translations, all well known in academic circles. Moskvin also occasionally worked as a journalist and regularly contributed to local newspapers and publications. Describing himself as a "necropolist", Moskvin was considered an expert on local cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast.
In 2005, Oleg Riabov, a fellow academic and publisher, commissioned Moskvin to summarize and list the dead in more than 700 cemeteries in forty regions of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast. Moskvin claimed that over the next two years, he had gone on foot to inspect 752 cemeteries across the region, walking up to 30 km (18.6 miles) a day. During these travels, he drank from puddles, spent nights in haystacks and at abandoned farms, or slept in the cemeteries themselves, even going so far as to spend a night in a coffin being prepared for a funeral. On his extensive travels, Moskvin was sometimes questioned by police on the suspicion of vandalism and theft, but was never arrested or detained after stating his academic credentials and purpose. The work itself remains unpublished but has been described as "unique" and "priceless" by Alexei Yesin, the editor of Necrologies, a weekly paper to which Moskvin was a regular contributor. After his arrest, Yesin stated that he was confident there had been a mistake and Moskvin would be exonerated. Later, Yesin told the Associated Press that Moskvin was a loner who had "certain quirks" but who gave no indication that he was up to anything unusual.
Between 2006 and 2010, Moskvin worked as a freelance correspondent for the newspaper Nizhny Novgorod Worker, publishing articles twice a month. His father also sometimes wrote for the same paper. During 2008, Moskvin wrote an extensive series of articles on the history of Nizhny Novgorod cemeteries that appeared in the paper.
A Russian graverobber who kept a house of horrors with 26 bodies of dead little girls that he had mummified has been denied a bid for freedom so that he could get married.
Historian Anatoly Moskvin, 55, from the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, was arrested a decade ago after it emerged he had dug up corpses of girls aged between three and 12.
However, instead of being prosecuted, he was ruled mentally unfit to stand trial and sent to a psychiatric clinic.
The parents of Moskvin said that they were unaware of the real story behind their son's "dolls."
The professor's mother Elvira, who was 76 at the time, recalled, "We noticed these dolls, but we had no idea there were corpses inside. Making such large dolls seemed like his pastime to us, we saw nothing wrong with it."
He spoke 13 languages, traveled extensively, taught at the college level, and was a journalist in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia’s fifth-largest city. Moskvin was also a self-proclaimed expert on cemeteries, and dubbed himself a “necropolyst.” One colleague called his work “priceless.”
In total, 29 life-size dolls were found in Moskvin's residence by the authorities. They were three to 25 years old. He kept one corpse for over nine years.
Moskvin admitted to 44 charges of mistreating graves and corpses in court. "You abandoned your girls, I brought them home and warmed them up," he told the parents of the victims.
Natalia Chardymova, 46, the mother of 10-year-old murder victim Olga Chardymova, did not realize that during her regular visits to her daughter’s graveside, the coffin was empty.
Locals started finding graves that belonged to their loved ones desecrated, sometimes fully dug up, in 2009.
The figurines have a vintage doll appearance. They dressed beautifully and variedly. Some had makeup applied over their faces that Moskvin had covered with cloth, while others wore knee-high boots. Additionally, he had cloth-wrapped their hands. However, they were actual real girls who had been mummified, not toys.
One of the bodies began to play music as soon as cops moved it. Many of the dolls' trunks featured music boxes that Moskvin had inserted.
As a child, I had a book on Ancient Egypt. While it no doubt depicted Ancient Egyptians in a completely historically inaccurate way—aka white with a tan—the chapter I really loved was on mummies. Looking back, I should’ve realized my love of the macabre was life-long because I was six years old and fascinated with reading about the hook they used to slowly pull the corpse’s brains out of its nostrils, and the urns they would keep the organs in, and the embalming process they used to preserve the skin. I loved the illustrations; I can still see them in my mind’s eye.
I’m still fascinated with death and decay and the human obsession with death, but not like Anatoly Moskvin, a journalist from Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. He considered himself a “necropolyst,” or an expert on cemeteries, and was a regular contributor to the Russian obituary newspaper Necrologies. He was obsessed with death and didn’t see why he couldn’t have his cake and eat it too.
In 2011, Moskvin was arrested for the exhumation and mummification of 29 girls between the ages of three and 25. He kept them in his apartment, preserved and dressed up and painted like life-sized dolls.
Moskvin’s obsession with death began with an apparent brush with necrophilia at age 11. When passing by a funeral of a young girl, he was asked to be her “husband.” The clearly fucked up adults at the memorial asked him to kiss her corpse and then put on a wedding ring that matched one on her finger. Maybe that made the girl’s parents feel better somehow, but it started an obsession that would later prove deadly for 29 other girls.
He was lonely, he claimed. The adoption agencies wouldn’t let him adopt a child, thankfully. So he resorted to digging up young female corpses to come to live with him. He would preserve them with salt and baking soda. He considered them his children and claimed that he didn’t have a sexual attraction to their corpses. He liked to hang out and watch TV with them in his apartment, but he also had some he disliked and stashed in his garage. His parents pretty much left him alone because they must have sensed he was a complete weirdo.
In his last article for the publication, dated October 26, 2011, Moskvin divulged how a group of men in black suits stopped him on the way home from school. They were en route to the funeral of 11-year-old Natasha Petrova and dragged young Anatoly along to her coffin where they forced him to kiss the girl’s corpse.
Meanwhile, Moskvin roamed from cemetery to cemetery. “I don’t think anyone in the city knows them better than I do,” he said of his extensive knowledge of the region’s dead. From 2005 to 2007, Moskvin claimed to have visited 752 cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod.
He took detailed notes on each one and delved into the histories of those buried there. The hands-on historian claimed to have walked up to 20 miles per day, sometimes sleeping on hay bales and drinking rainwater from puddles.
Moskvin posted a documentary series of his travels and discoveries entitled “Great Walks Around Cemeteries” and “What the Dead Said.” These continue to be published in a weekly newspaper.
He even said he spent one night sleeping in a coffin ahead of a deceased person’s funeral. Anatoly Moskvin’s observations were more than just observations, however.
Then, a break in the investigation came following a terrorist attack at Domodedovo airport in Moscow in 2011. Shortly afterward, authorities heard reports of Muslim graves being desecrated in Nizhny Novgorod. Investigators were led to a cemetery where someone was painting over the pictures of dead Muslims but not damaging anything else.
This was where Anatoly Moskvin was finally caught. Eight police officers went to his apartment after they apprehended him at the graves of the Muslims to gather evidence.
The figures resembled antique dolls. They wore fine and varied clothing. Some wore knee-high boots, others had makeup on over faces Moskvin had covered in fabric. He had also hidden their hands in fabric. Except these were not dolls — they were the mummified corpses of human girls.
There were also photographs and plaques taken off of the gravestones, doll-making manuals, and maps of local cemeteries strewn about the apartment. Police even discovered that the clothes worn by the mummified corpses were the clothes in which they were buried.
Investigators later found music boxes or toys inside the bodies of the dead girls so that they could produce sounds when Moskvin touched them. There were also personal belongings and clothing inside some of the mummies. One mummy had a piece of her own gravestone with her name scrawled on it inside her body. Another one contained a hospital tag with the date and the cause of the girl’s death. A dried human heart was found inside a third body.
Anatoly Moskvin admitted that he would stuff the decayed corpses with rags. Then he would wrap nylon tights around their faces or fashion doll faces onto them. He would also insert buttons or toy eyes into the girls’ eye sockets so that they could “watch cartoons” with him.
Vladimir Stravinskas, head of the Investigative Committee of Russia for the Nizhny Novgorod region, called the case exceptional and unparalleled in modern forensics.
Between 2006 and 2010, Moskvin worked as a freelance correspondent for the newspaper Nizhny Novgorod Worker, publishing articles twice a month. His father also sometimes wrote for the paper. During 2008, Moskvin wrote an extensive series of articles on the history of Nizhny Novgorod cemeteries that appeared in the paper.
Moskvin was aware that he was committing a crime, but felt the dead children were "calling out" to be rescued and believed that rescuing the children was more important than obeying the law. He was also motivated by his own desire to have children, specifically a daughter. Moskvin often regretted that he never had children and at one point attempted to adopt a young girl against the wishes of his parents, but his application was declined due to his low income. Moskvin denied any sexual attraction to the dolls and instead considered them to be his children. He spoke to and interacted with the corpses, sang songs to them, watched cartoons with them, and even held birthday parties and celebrated holidays for their benefit.
Moskvin was arrested on November 2, 2011, by police investigating a spate of grave desecrations in cemeteries in and around Nizhny Novgorod. Investigators from the Centre for Combating Extremism discovered the twenty-six bodies, initially reported as twenty-nine,in Moskvin's flat and garage. Video released by police shows the bodies seated on shelves and sofas in small rooms full of books, papers and general clutter. Although only twenty-six bodies were discovered in his home, Moskvin was suspected of desecrating as many as 150 graves after police found numerous grave accoutrements such as metal nameplates removed from headstones. Police also discovered instructions for making the "dolls", maps of cemeteries in the region, and a collection of photographs and videos depicting open graves and disinterred bodies, though none of this evidence could be conclusively connected to any of the bodies found in the apartment. According to the investigation, the bodies primarily came from cemeteries in the Nizhny Novgorod region, though some may have come from as far away as Moscow. Moskvin actively cooperated with investigators and claimed he made the dolls over the course of ten years. His parents, who were away for large portions of the year, were unaware of his activities.
Moskvin was charged under Article 244 of the Criminal Code for the desecration of graves and dead bodies, a charge which carried up to five years in prison. Originally Moskvin was also accused of having defaced the graves of Muslims, considered a hate crime, but this charge was later dropped. After a psychiatric evaluation, it was determined that Moskvin had a form of paranoid schizophrenia. In a hearing on 25 May 2012, the Leninsky District Court of Nizhny Novgorod deemed Moskvin unfit to stand trial, releasing him from criminal liability. He was instead sentenced to "coercive medical measures". The prosecution was satisfied with the decision and did not appeal the verdict.
Moskvin was moved to a psychiatric clinic, with his stay to be reviewed regularly. In February 2013, a hearing approved an extension of his treatment. Moskvin's treatment was again extended April 2014, and yet again in July 2015. In 2014 a spokesman stated, "After three years of monitoring him in a psychiatric clinic, it is absolutely clear that Moskvin is not mentally fit for trial...He will therefore be kept for psychiatric treatment at the clinic." In September 2018 Moskvin's doctors stated that he was no longer dangerous and petitioned the court to release him for outpatient care from home; however, in February 2019 a subsequent psychiatric evaluation found that it was too early to release Moskvin, and the hospital withdrew their petition.
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