![The Disturbing Case of Anatoly Moskvin](https://sundevilscoop.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/download-1-2.jpeg)
Anatoly Yuryevich Moskvin is a Russian former linguist, philologist, and historian who was arrested in 2011 after the mummified bodies of twenty-six girls and women between the ages of 3 and 29 were discovered in his apartment in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.
When Anatoly was 13, he had a very strange encounter with a group of people en route to a funeral happening in his town. He was on his way home from school when men in black suits stopped him. They were on the way to the funeral of 11-year-old Nathasha Petrova. They dragged him to her coffin and forced the young boy to kiss the corpse. Natasha’s mother put a wedding ring on both her daughter and Anatoly. This “marriage” led to a belief in magic and a fascination with the dead. For the next 30 years, Anatoly’s disturbing thoughts would go unchecked by his parents and any outsiders.
Since that day, Anatoly wandered cemeteries and eventually got an advanced degree in Celtic studies. The Celtic culture often blurs the line between life and death. From 2005- 2007 he claimed to have visited 752 cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod. He took detailed notes on the buried, and walked 20 miles a day, sometimes sleeping on hay bales and drinking from puddles. He wrote and published his stories in a weekly newspaper. Soon, things got even more unsettling.
In 2009, people started to call in reports of the graves of their loved ones being dug up. The Russian military thought it was being done by an extremist organization of people. They set out with the best crime detectives they could find. Almost 2 years went by and the detectives couldn’t find anything, the graves continued to be desecrated. Finally, in 2011, there was a breakthrough. While investigating a terrorist attack in Moscow, the authorities heard of someone digging up a grave in Nizhny.
Finally, they caught Moskvin. Inside the 45-year-old’s apartment that he shared with his parents, the police found life-sized dolls throughout the rooms. Some wore knee-high boots, others had makeup on over their 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 he had dug up. In some of the dolls, there were music boxes, in one body, there was a dried human heart. Moskvin claimed to be lonely, the adoption agencies wouldn’t let him adopt because he didn’t have a steady income. This was for the best seeing as he had an extremely disturbing obsession with dead people.
Moskvin’s parents claimed to not know the true origin of their son’s dolls. His neighbors were shocked. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and sentenced to time in a psychiatric ward after his sentence.