Anatoly Moskvin’s human dollhouse

Anatoly Moskvin was a well-known historian in his city, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. A very intelligent man, he was an expert on cemeteries and spoke no fewer than 13 languages.

In 2011 it was discovered that this genius also had another “hobby”: he dug up recently deceased girls, mummified them, dressed them and kept them at home as if they were dolls.

Who Anatoly Moskvin was

Moskvin had graduated in philology from Moscow State University and was highly regarded in academic circles. He mainly studied Celtic history and folklore, taught at Nizhny Novgorod Linguistic University and had written dictionaries, translations and articles. At home he had a library of over 60,000 books and documents, and a large doll collection. Colleagues described him as a genius, but also as an eccentric.

He lived a solitary life with his parents, never married, did not drink or smoke. He called himself a “necropolist”: between 2005 and 2007 he visited 752 cemeteries in the region on foot to catalogue their dead, walking up to 30 kilometres a day, sleeping in haystacks, abandoned farms or the cemeteries themselves, and once even in a coffin prepared for a funeral. He also wrote for Necrologies, a weekly paper devoted to cemeteries and famous dead people.

The story of Anatoly Moskvin

The man was discovered on 2 November 2011, when police investigating a series of grave desecrations in local cemeteries turned up at his home. What they saw was horrifying and Anatoly was arrested.

In his flat and garage they found the mummified bodies of 26 girls aged between 3 and 13 (at first there was talk of 29). Anatoly dug up the girls, mummified them and turned them into dolls following instructions he had printed himself, following them scrupulously every time.

To mummify them he dried them with salt and baking soda and hid them in dry places in the cemeteries. Then he took them home, wrapped the limbs in strips of cloth, stuffed them with rags and dressed them in bright children’s clothes and wigs. Some had their faces covered with wax masks, made up with nail polish, while others were covered with fabric. According to some newspapers, he had even put music boxes inside the chests of some of them.

He kept them sitting on shelves and sofas, in rooms full of books and papers, gave them names, sang to them, watched cartoons with them and celebrated their birthdays. Recordings of these parties were also found in the house of horrors and

in one of them, while zooming in on a mummy’s face, he admits that the dolls are made from human remains.

Police also found maps of cemeteries, nameplates stolen from headstones and photos of open graves: he is suspected of desecrating up to 150 graves.

Anatoly’s parents, who lived with him but spent much of the year away, said they had never noticed anything. They thought making dolls was their son’s hobby, but would never have imagined they were corpses. One of the “dolls” was even in their room.

Anatoly explained his obsession with death by saying that as a boy, at the funeral of an 11-year-old girl, an adult had pushed his face onto the dead girl’s forehead, forcing him to kiss her.

The reason why

When he was arrested he said he did it to keep the girls warm because their families had left them out in the cold.

Moskvin believed the girls might one day come back to life, through science or black magic. Studying the Celtic druids and the ancient peoples of Siberia, he had read that they slept on graves to communicate with the dead, so he looked for obituaries of recently deceased girls and slept on their graves to “ask permission” to take them away. He said he had been doing it for about twenty years. When sleeping in cemeteries became too hard, he started taking them home.

He also said he had always wanted a daughter: he had even tried to adopt a girl, but his application was rejected because he earned too little. He always denied any sexual attraction and considered the dolls his children.

The arrest

Moskvin was charged with desecrating graves and dead bodies, an offence carrying up to five years in prison. A psychiatric evaluation found that he suffered from a form of paranoid schizophrenia and on 25 May 2012 the court found him unfit to stand trial, ordering compulsory psychiatric treatment. He has been held in a psychiatric hospital ever since.

In 2018 his doctors said he was no longer dangerous and asked for him to be treated at home, but in 2019 a new evaluation found it was still too early and the request was withdrawn.

The story of one of the victims’ mothers

Natalia Chardymova was the mother of little Olga, killed in 2002. Olga was only 10 when for the first time she was allowed to walk alone from her home to her grandmother’s, in the next block.

But a drug addict attacked her to steal her earrings and killed her. Her body was found only 5 months later.

On top of that grief, her mother had to bear having prayed for nine years at an empty grave.

Natalia also describes how Anatoly harassed the family by leaving notes on Olga’s grave for every occasion: her birthday, the start and end of the school year, national holidays. In the notes the man signed himself “The kind angel” and addressed the girl as “Miss”.

After several messages and some damage to the grave, they decided to call the police, who could not do much.

Only in 2011 was Anatoly discovered, and the police asked Natalia and her husband to open Olga’s grave.

When they opened it, they saw a hole in the top that Anatoly had made to take the body. Natalia cannot come to terms with the fact that the man lived with her little girl for nine years, almost as long as she did.

Sources

• Wikipedia, Anatoly Moskvin