Anatoly Moskvin, The Man Who Mummified And Collected Dead Girls

Anatoly Moskvin, The Man Who Mummified And Collected Dead Girls

Anatoly Moskvin is a Russian former journalist, college professor, and self-dubbed "necropolyst" with expert knowledge of cemeteries. For years, his hobby of collecting dolls hid a macabre obsession that drew upon his particular interests: digging up the dead and making dolls out of their corpses.

The Human Dolls Of Anatoly Moskvin

Anatoly Moskvin is a Russian former journalist, college professor, and self-dubbed "necropolyst" with expert knowledge of cemeteries. For years, his hobby of collecting dolls hid a macabre obsession that drew upon his particular interests: digging up the dead and making dolls out of their corpses.

After making his human dolls, he kept them in his home as his companions and lovers. "I kissed her once, then again, then again," Moskvin wrote about one of his dolls, made from the body of an 11-year-old girl.

Police finally caught Moskvin in 2011, after years of increasing suspicion at the growing number of desecrated graves in his home city of Nizhny Novgorod. When they searched his home, they found 26 life-sized dolls — or rather, mummified corpses — scattered throughout.

Anatoly Yuryevich Moskvin (Russian: Анатолий Юрьевич Москвин; born 1 September 1966) 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. 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 psychiatric evaluation determined that Moskvin had a form of paranoid schizophrenia. In May 2012, he was sentenced to court-ordered psychiatric evaluation and has since been held in a psychiatric hospital.

Vladimir Stravinskas, head of the Investigative Committee of Russia for the Nizhny Novgorod region, called the case exceptional and unparalleled in modern forensics

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