The Russian Doll Collector

During the height of his career, Anatoly Moskvin was a well-regarded linguist at Moscow State University.

He was revered for his academics and was obsessed with Celtic occultism, and burial rituals. He had a personal library of over 60,000 books and documents on rituals and rites related to the occult. The unassuming Anatoly Yuryevich Moskvin is a Russian philologist, historian and linguist from Nizhny Novgorod, Russia’s fifth-largest city. He loves history, speaks 13 languages, has travelled extensively, taught at college level, and was a renowned journalist. Anatoly Moskvin is also a self-proclaimed expert on cemeteries, and dubbed himself a “necropolyst.” One of his colleagues even called his work “priceless.” He was known as the ultimate expert on cemeteries and the dead.

Anatoly Moskvin lived with his parents. He was a loner who had a collection of 29 life-sized dolls, which he kept in the small apartment. They were posed as if sitting, reading or doing other daily activities.

Anatoly was an avid contributor to Necrologies,

which was a weekly publication dedicated to cemeteries and obituaries. In October 2011, Anatoly divulged in what was to be his last article for the publication, how when he was 13, a group of men in black suits stopped him on the way home from school — an incident which he attributes as the beginning of his obsession with the dead and macabre.

Anatoly recounts in the article the men were taking part in a funeral of 11-year old Natasha Petrova, when they saw him and dragged him over to her coffin where he was forced to kiss her.

Allegedly the girl’s grieving mother then put a wedding ring on Anatoly’s finger and a wedding ring on her dead daughter’s finger.

Anatoly wrote, “I kissed her once, then again, then again. My strange marriage with Natasha Petrova was useful,”. He explained it led to him believing in magic and ultimately it manifested into an infatuation which shaped his career and took over his life.

As Anatoly Moskvin grew up, his fascination with the dead started to grow, he took to wandering and exploring cemeteries. He also went on to earn an advanced degree in Celtic studies, a culture whose mythology often blurs the lines between life and death. He mastered an impressive 13 languages and became a renown well-published scholar.

Anatoly’s hobby involved roaming from cemetery to cemetery, taking detailed notes on each cemetery and that he delved into the histories of those who were buried there. “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.

Anatoly claims to have visited 752 cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod between 2005 to 2007 alone. Anatoly states he would easily cover up to 20 miles per day, sleeping on hay bales and drinking rainwater, and even sleeping in a coffin ahead of a deceased person’s funeral. Anatoly posted a documentary series entitled “Great Walks Around Cemeteries” and “What the Dead Said”.

For years there had been random reports of grave desecration

but in 2009 when more reports started coming in, Valery Gribakin, Russian Interior Ministry spokesman General, told CNN “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 two years after this statement, the leads had gone nowhere and the Graves continued to be desecrated, yet no one knew why. What was the motive and link?

Then, 2 years later in 2011, there was a break

in the investigation following a terrorist attack at Domodedovo airport in Moscow. Shortly after the attack, authorities heard reports of Muslim graves being desecrated in Nizhny Novgorod, so Investigators went to a cemetery where someone had painted over pictures of the dead Muslims — and this was where cemetery-expert, Anatoly Moskvin, was apprehended at the cemetery and questioned.

After Anatoly’s interviews, eight police officers went to his apartment to gather evidence.

Inside the small apartment, the Police found 29 child-sized, dolls, one of which Anatoly had in his possession for nearly nine years. Some resembled antique dolls, dressed in fine clothing, with their make-up painted on faces which were appeared to be made of wax and fabric. They also had music boxes inside their chests — when police moved one of them, it started to play music.

A video released by police on their website shows the dolls seated on shelves or sofas, in small rooms stacked with books and papers.

They found evidence which linked Anatoly to numerous graves which had been reported as desecrated and in some instances dug up.

Anatoly had noted down the birthdays of each of the missing girls and would celebrate each one’s birthday in his bedroom as if they were his own children. He had photographs and plaques which he had taken off of their gravestones, doll-making manuals, and maps of cemeteries. Police even discovered that some of the clothes worn by the dolls were the actual clothes in which the missing girls had been buried.

So where were the bodies?

It turned out that they were right under the investigators’ noses the entire time they were searching the apartment.

Upon closer inspection, the dolls were hiding a far more sinister secret — they were, in fact, the mummified remains of human girls.

There were also personal belongings and clothing inside some of the dolls.

One had a piece of her own gravestone with her name on it inside her. A dried human heart was found inside another. Another one contained a hospital tag with the date and the cause of her death.

Anatoly said that he loved his dolls, though Police also found a few in his garage, which Anatoly claimed he had grown to dislike. He explained that he would stuff the decayed corpses with rags, then would wrap nylon tights around their faces so he could create their faces would of wax and fabric, then he would insert buttons or toy eyes into the eye sockets so that they could “watch cartoons” with him. Police say Anatoly was not motivated by sexual desires, with one officer saying: “He loathed sex and thought it was disgusting”

Anatoly said he made the dolls because he was lonely. His biggest dream was to have children, but the Russian adoption agencies wouldn’t let him adopt a child — because he didn’t make enough money. Anatoly went on to say that he had made his dolls because he was waiting for science to find a way to bring the dead back to life, but until that day arrived, he used a simple method of salt and baking soda to preserve the girls he bought home.

Yet his parents, who were also living in the apartment, claimed to know nothing of the true origins of Anatoly’s “dolls.”

Elvira, Anatoly’s then-76-year-old mom, 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 and Anatoly’s father Yury, 77, went to their country house each summer, leaving him alone in the apartment, which is apparently when Anatoly used this to his advantage and visited graveyards to obtain his next “doll”.

The Moskvin’s Neighbours were all shocked, stating that the historian was quiet and that his parents were nice people. They even dismissed the rancid smell which emanated from his apartment down to the “stink of something that rots in the basements,” of all the local buildings — No one suspected a thing.

Even Moskvin’s editor at Necrologies, Alexei Yesin, states he didn’t think anything of his writer’s eccentricities either. “Many of his articles enlighten his sensual interest in deceased young women, which I took for romantic and somewhat childish fantasies the talented writer emphasized.” He went on to describe the historian as having “quirks” but that he would never have imagined that one of them included mummifying 29 girls.

It was thought that Anatoly Moskvin had dug up the graves of over 150 girls.

The court dubbed him an insane genius and he was charged with a dozen crimes, all of which dealt with the desecration of graves.

In court, Anatoly Moskvin confessed to 44 counts of abusing graves and dead bodies.

He told the grieving victims’ parents, “You abandoned your girls, I brought them home and warmed them up.”

The Russian media called him “The Lord of the Mummies” and “The Perfumer” (after Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume) and it is believed that the 2009 movie “The Collector” was inspired by Anatoly Moskvin.

Anatoly claimed he could communicate with the girls, and would speak to them. He went on to explain to Police that each of his victims was carefully selected: “I lay on the grave and tried to get in touch with her. I listened to what she said. Often they asked me to take them out for a walk.”

Anatoly Moskvin was diagnosed with schizophrenia and sentenced to a psychiatric ward, following his sentencing.

In September 2018, he was given the opportunity to continue psychiatric treatment in his home.

A judge demanded a new set of psychiatric tests, which found Anatoly Moskvin’s condition had “deteriorated’, but there has been an unexplained delay in approving an order to keep him detained.

In 2002, Olga pleaded with her parents to be allowed to go to her Grandmother’s apartment in the next building.

“I’m ten already. I can go myself,” she told them. Her mother, Natalia, relented — a decision that will probably haunt her for the rest of her life.

After she and her husband Igor left for work, Olga set off with her favourite green bag and blue umbrella to go visit her Grandmother.

Unfortunately for the Chardymova family, a drug addict/dealer who lived in their apartment block saw Olga and decided to rob her. He forced her back upstairs, but because Olga tried to escape, her abductor struck her over the head with a metal bar, killing her.

Olga was eventually found in the attic of the building, wedged behind some pipes, some 5 months later.

On the 2nd October 2002 Olga was laid to rest and in May 2003, Natalia and husband Igor, 44, were erecting and painting a small metal fence they had put around the grave. The next day, they came back to finish and felt someone had been there, as a wreath had been moved.

Later that same month they found a note signed with two letters — D.A. — standing for Dobry Angel or Kind Angel — the name Moskvin used to refer to himself.

“We shivered with fear each time we went to the grave, not knowing what to expect,” Natalia said. “These sick anonymous notes were addressed to my daughter, calling her “Little Lady”. He congratulated her on all the public holidays. He remembered about 1 September each year (the first day of the school year in Russia) and the last school bell in May. He counted carefully which school grade she was about the enter as if she was still alive. For example ‘happy last month of your 6th year at school. Imagine what it was like for us, her grieving parents, reading these notes about our murdered daughter. It was not at all like some sick joke but a spear through our hearts.”

Sometimes, the confused parents arrived at the grave to find soft toys — stolen from other plots, and on January 1st they would find New Year decorations on the grave. One note, however, became threatening: “If you don’t erect a great monument which she deserves, we will dig her body out.”

The grieving parents erected a headstone in June 2003, and returned to find messages on it and that an axe had been taken to it.

Natalia reported it to the police, who told her there was little they could do. “They told us, if you find him, do what you want to this barbarian, we won’t object. At this point we knew nothing about Moskvin, or that by now he had already removed her, but if I’d met him at Olga’s grave, I’d have killed him with my own hands.”

Natalia wanted to move to a new flat and try and rebuild her life. But Igor refused to leave their flat where he sat for hours on end in Olga’s room. The strain drove them apart. ‘I just could not live in the block where my daughter was murdered. And Igor did not want to sell the flat, he would go into Olga’s room and stare at her things. Finally, I left and went to live with my mother.’

Fourteen months later they reconciled, and Natalia fell pregnant with a son, Alexei, who Natalia stated: “has restored my faith in life”.

However, the unknown visitor was still visiting Olga’s grave, leaving notes, and damaging the metal cross.

In 2011, police arrested Anatoly Moskvin after questioning him about other similar reports of graves being disturbed.

The police said whilst gathering evidence at Anatoly’s apartment they found Anatoly’s copious notes, in which it was documented visits to Olga’s grave in May 2003 — the same time Natalia reported that someone had been desecrating the grave and leaving notes.

The police contacted Natalia and told her they needed to open her daughter’s coffin. “When we opened the grave with policemen in October 2012, we found a coffin there which looked amazingly well preserved after ten years — but it had a hole at the top. Moskvin had dug down, cut the hole, and pulled Olga’s body out. I almost collapsed. I felt sick. My girl had been murdered, if anyone deserved to rest in peace, she did, but instead her grave had been robbed. You can’t begin to imagine it, that somebody would touch the grave of your child, the most holy place in this world for you. We had been visiting the grave of our child for nine years and we had no idea it was empty. Instead, she was in this beast’s apartment. They told me to see her: the sight was too grotesque, they said. But I have seen the pictures of some of the other girls.”

Upon hearing the news that Anatoly Moskvin was to be released,

Natalia stated “This creature brought fear, terror and panic into my (life). I shudder to think that he will have freedom to go where he wants. Neither my family nor the families of the other victims will be able to sleep peacefully. He needs to be kept under surveillance. I insist on a life sentence. Only under medical supervision, without the right of free movement. I still find it hard to grasp the scale of his sickening ‘work’ but for nine years he was living with my mummified daughter in his bedroom, I had her for ten years, he had her for nine. He is incurable. If he is released, he cannot be treated properly as an outpatient. ‘He will just stop taking pills, and at some stage he will return to his sinister actions as he has promised to do.”

Local prosecutors agree with Natalia although psychiatrists state Anatoly, now in his early 50s, is improving. Anatoly Moskvin even allegedly told them to not bother reburying the girls too deeply, as he will simply dig them up again them when he is released.

Since his prosecution, several of Moskvin’s colleagues quit their collaboration with him.

His mother Elvira also suggested that she and her husband might just kill themselves since they are now forced to live in total isolation as their entire community has ostracized them.

And if you thought this really couldn’t get any weirder, there is even an online petition supporting Anatoly Moskvin’s actions:

TO: President Donald Trump, The Georgia State House, The Georgia State Senate, Governor Brian Kemp, The United States House of Representatives, and The United States Senate

Free Anatoly Moskvin

Anatoly Moskvin is being unjustly imprisoned in a psychiatric ward for showing a great deal of tender loving care to dead children. Please help free him from this injustice!

Free this innocent man who’s only crime was caring too much!

Why is it that when an archaeologist digs up dead bodies to put on public display it’s perfectly acceptable, but when Anatoly Moskvin does it he is a sick criminal?

Let’s do away with this double standard and free Anatoly to continue his loving work!