- WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
- Anatoly Moskvin wedged music boxes into some corpses so they made noise
- The historian named each of the dolls and celebrated their birthdays
- His parents had seen the figures in his home but thought they were just toys
Just over a decade ago, a well-educated Russian historian was captured by authorities when they stumbled upon his grisly collection of hand-made human dolls scattered throughout his apartment.
Once a respected figure in his field, horrific truths began surfacing in 2011 about Anatoly Moskvin, 57, that revealed he was digging up dead females and turning them into dolls. It was believed that by the end of his two-decade-long span of graverobbing, he had desecrated around 150 in total.
Dumped among the mounds of clutter within the home of Moskvin, from Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, were 26 mummified bodies of girls and women aged between three and 29.
The scholar-turned-bodysnatcher had unearthed the dead girls and lived with their corpses in his house of horrors after turning them into ghoulish playthings and adorning them with lipstick, makeup, and knee-length boots.
He dug up the bodies of the girls before dragging them back to his home, where he would turn them into showpieces that resembled antique dolls with red lips, blushed cheeks, and brightly coloured, frilly dresses.
Chilling images of his sickening collection show bodies and skeletons in stockings and costumes, with one even dressed to resemble a child’s teddy bear.
Footage later released by cops showed the dead children placed around his house in bizarre outfits, poking out from behind curtains and shoved into gaps in his walls.
They were also seen seated on shelves and sofas, surrounded by clutter.
Some were found with their faces wrapped in fabric which Moskvin had applied makeup over, and others had their hands concealed in sheets of fabric.
A terrifying image of one of Moskvin’s victims showed a skull covered in a thick layer of wax as the teeth protruded from the dead girls mouth.
He admitted he would stuff the decayed corpses with rags before wrapping their faces with nylon tights, or attach fashion doll’s faces on top of the human ones.
Moskvin would also insert buttons or toy eyes into the girls’ eye sockets so that they could ‘watch cartoons’ with him.
The self-proclaimed ‘necropolyst’ – an expert on cemeteries- had collected photographs and plaques taken off the gravestones, doll-making manuals, and maps of local cemeteries, as well as the original clothes worn by the dead girls from when they were buried.
When police eventually caught Moskvin, they found music boxes and toys wedged into the bodies, so that the dolls could produce sounds for the perverted man when he touched them.
There were also personal belongings and clothing buried inside some of the mummies, and one even had part of her tombstone with her name scrawled on it stuffed inside her body.
It was revealed that the highly-trained bodysnatcher marked the birthday of each of his dead victims in his bedroom in chilling rituals, as well as named them and organised parties for his ‘toys’.
Dubbed ‘Lord of the Mummy’ by local Russian media, he had preserved the girls using salt and baking soda as they had all died many years earlier.
It was unclear if each doll contained a full set of human remains.
Moskvin’s parents had reportedly seen the haunting dolls scattered around their home which Moskvin lived in – but alleged they had no idea that they contained the bodies of several deceased girls.
His mother Elvira, 84, said: ‘We saw these dolls but we did not suspect there were dead bodies inside.
‘We thought it was his hobby to make such big dolls and did not see anything wrong with it.’
She claimed after a 2020 decision against releasing him that the court was biased against her son who was ‘not able to be in society, work, or get married’.
Background
During the Soviet years, Moskvin worked as a translator in the Red Army, but his warped love for the dead had been brewing deep inside him for many years prior.
Moskvin attributed his macabre obsession to a 1979 incident, that took place when the sick historian was just 13.
The ‘cemetery expert’ shared the story in Necrologies, a weekly Russian publication dedicated to cemeteries and obituaries, to which he was a committed contributor.
In Moskvin’s final article for the publication, dated October 26, 2011, he told how a group of men donning black suits had allegedly stopped him on his way home from school.
They had been en-route to the funeral of 11-year-old Natasha Petrova before dragging Moskvin to her coffin where they forced him to kiss her corpse.
Moskvin wrote: ‘An adult pushed my face down to the waxy forehead of the girl in an embroidered cap, and there was nothing I could do but kiss her as ordered.
‘I kissed her once, then again, then again.’
The girl’s grieving mother then allegedly put a wedding ring on young Moskvin’s finger and a wedding ring on her dead daughter’s finger.
‘My strange marriage with Natasha Petrova was useful,’ Moskvin said in the article.
He claimed it was this experience that led him down the path to a wild belief in magic, and a grisly fascination with the dead.
The schoolboy then began to wander through cemeteries, with his morbid interests leading him down a path to eventually earn a degree in Celtic studies – a culture whose mythology often blurs the lines between life and death.
He began exploring burial rituals, death, and the occult, and kept a large personal library of over 60,000 books and documents on the topics.
The historian also mastered 13 languages and was published as a scholar on multiple occasions, with fellow academics describing him as both a genius, and eccentric.
But while he appeared as an academic genius to those on the outside world, he buried within him a haunting side as he continued roaming from cemetery to cemetery.
From 2005 to 2007, Moskvin claimed to have paid a visit to some 752 graveyards in Nizhny Novgorod.
He would take detailed notes on each one and immerse himself in the history of the bodies that had been laid to rest there.
The disturbed scholar claimed to have walked up to 20miles per day, sometimes sleeping on hay bales and being forced to drink rainwater from puddles.
He also claimed to have once slept inside a coffin readied for a funeral.
In 2009, however, his interests took a physical turn as locals began to discover the graves of their loved ones had been tampered with, and sometimes completely dug up.
Russian Interior Ministry spokesman General Valery Gribakin told CNN at the time: ‘Our leading theory was that it was done by some extremist organizations.
‘We decided to beef up our police units and set up … groups composed of our most experienced detectives who specialize in extremist crimes.’
But for almost two years, authorities’ leads led nowhere.
Graves continued being desecrated, and no one had any idea why.
A turning point finally came in 2011 following a terrorist attack at Domodedovo airport in Moscow.
Officers learned that Muslim graves were being disturbed in Nizhny Novgorod and were led to a cemetery where they found the culprit painting over the pictures of dead Muslims.
But that is not all they would discover.
Moskvin was finally caught while desecrating a grave in the same cemetery, and eight police officers the stormed his apartment as they hunted for evidence.
What they found shook the world.
Parents of the victims
In 2022, fears were sparked among the parents of the victims after it was reported that the grave robber could be freed from jail after a psychiatrist backed his release.
Courts had repeatedly refused to release him, but psychiatric medics came forward to shockingly suggest that there was no medical reason to keep Moskvin in secure accommodation.
Parents of the dead children pleaded to keep him behind bars for the rest of his life, fearing he would quickly return to his sick habits if released.
The corpse of murder victim Olga Chardymova, aged ten, was one of the 26 Moskvin dug up and turned into mummified dolls.
Her mother Natalia Chardymova did not realise that on her regular visits to her daughter’s graveside, the coffin was empty because Moskvin had stolen Olga’s corpse for his sick collection.
‘This latest news about releasing him is certainly not good,’ said Natalia at the time.
‘I am also very afraid that he will go back to his old ways. I have no faith in his recovery. He’s a fanatic.
‘And it will be very hard for us, God forbid, to go through those events one more time – exhumation and reburial – if he again finds the place she was reburied’.
The distraught mother consistently opposed his release and said ‘this creature brought fear, terror and panic into my life’ with his ‘grotesque’ abuse of the dead children.
‘I would be happy to know he will spend his life in the hospital,’ she said.
In 2020, Moskvin had consistently refused to apologise to the families of his victims.
Earlier, Moskvin told the parents: ‘You abandoned your girls in the cold – and I brought them home and warmed them up.
‘These girls are girls,’ he added, there are no parents in my view.
‘I don’t know any of them.
‘Besides, they buried their daughters, and this is where I believe their rights over them finished…
‘So no, I would not apologise.’
Arrest and motive
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.
But after undergoing psychiatric evaluation, it was determined that the bodysnatcher had a form of paranoid schizophrenia.
In a hearing on May 25, 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’ and moved to a psychiatric clinic.
In 2014, a spokesman said: ‘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’.
Following his arrest, Moskvin was interviewed by Russian media where he revealed the twisted ‘motives’ behind his spate of horror crimes.
He stated he felt great sympathy for the dead girls and thought they could be brought back to live by science or black magic.
As an expert on Celtic culture, he learned that the ancient Druids slept on graves to grow closer to the spirits of the dead and communicate with them.
He began searching for obituaries of deceased local children, and when he found one that ‘spoke to him’ he would sleep on the child’s grave to determine whether the deceased wanted to be brought back to life.
He admitted he had been doing this for around 20 years, but never dug up the body of a child without their permission.
As he grew older, he said it started becoming painful to sleep on the graves, which is when he began bringing them home.
He was also allegedly motivated by his own desire to have children, specifically a daughter.
Moskvin once attempted to adopt a young girl but his application was rejected due to his low income.
He denied any sexual attraction toward the dolls and claimed he instead considered them his children as he spoke with them, sang songs to them, and watched cartoons with them.
However, Moskvin told authorities in 2020 that he wanted to marry his ‘girlfriends’ and work as a language tutor.
Emily Foster is a globe-trotting journalist based in the UK. Her articles offer readers a global perspective on international events, exploring complex geopolitical issues and providing a nuanced view of the world’s most pressing challenges.
