While I normally like to write about serial killers – this man, Anatoly Moskvin, does not fit into that category. He was ultimately arrested on November 2, 2011 and was charged with desecration of graves and dead bodies. While this seems very out of place for my usual posts, he withheld any apologies to his victims (their families) saying they threw their children away and that he took them in. The families were still impacted by his actions, in addition to the human remains that he disturbed/took.
So, Anatoly Moskvin is a Russian historian – former linguist and philologist – from Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod). He was fascinated by Celtic culture, the occult, and burial practices. Apparently, he spent lots of time in cemeteries as a child and carried his fascination into adulthood.
He published an article before his arrest attributing his fascination with burials and death to an incident when he was young, walking home from school. He would be dragged to a funeral of an 11 year old girl.
At the funeral, his face was pushed down to the girl’s face and he was ordered to kiss her. He obeyed the men who dragged him there, and the girl’s mother placed a ring on his finger and that of her daughter.
He grew up and excelled academically, and was considered to be an eccentric genius among his colleagues. He worked for the Institute of Foreign Languages, and has published many articles under his name throughout his career. His private library contained over 60,000 books and documents.
Moskivin described himself as a “necropolist”, or a cemetery expert, and was commissioned in 2005 by Oleg Riabov to make a summarized list of the deceased from the more than 700 cemeteries across the 40 regions of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast.
Despite his success in life, he preferred to be a loner and never married and was living with his parents by choice at the time of his arrest in 2011. He did express later in life that he greatly regretted not having children, and that he doubted he could ever adopt a child (specifically a daughter) may have played a role in the crimes he would commit.
While traveling, he managed to attract the attention of the police, who suspected him of vandalism or theft. He would explain his work and use his credentials to avoid arrest. His work wasn’t published from this particular work, but he was a regular contributor to Necrologies.
So, Moskvin was suspected of grave desecration (about 150 of them actually…), the police were investigating the cemeteries around Nizhny Novgorod, where he was caught digging. He was arrested and his apartment was searched.
They thought there were large dolls on shelves and seated on the sofa, but they were in fact mummified bodies from girls and women, ranging in age from 3 to 29 years old.
His parents were away a lot, so they weren’t missing any warning signs or in any way in danger from their son. They knew about the bodies, but they assumed they were dolls, not suspecting that their son made a hobby of mummifying human remains and using them as company. No – not company. There is no record of necrophilia.
As the police investigation continued, they found nameplates which were removed from headstones, mummification instructions, cemetery maps, and media of open graves. But, none of that evidence connected directly to any of the 29 bodies that were found in his apartment. He had been hiding in plain sight for over 10 years.
Now, for this case, his victims were actually graves. He explained that Druids would communicate with the dead by sleeping on their graves. Siberian culture had a similar practice, and he felt perhaps he could bring these children back to life. So, he would read the obituaries of children who were recently deceased, and would act if it spoke to him. From there, he would sleep on their graves and listen to them if they wanted him to attempt to bring them back to life.
He started to bring the bodies home, hoping they would be more comfortable inside the underground and would be more likely to speak to him.
Because of rot, he experimented with how to properly preserve the bodies, and how to avoid detection. He knew he was committing a crime, but he honestly felt sorry for the children and wanted to try to help them. So he tried drying the bodies, and eventually wrapped them so they would look like giant dolls, evening going as far as adding masks and dressing them in clothing and wigs. Many of the clothes the “dolls” wore were the outfits they were buried in.
He received a psych evaluation after his arrest and was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. Ultimately, this meant instead of going to trial and to jail, Moskvin would go for psychiatric treatment or “coercive medical measures.”
The hospital did petition to have him released as “cured” and re-enter society, but his psych evaluation determined he was not ready to be considered for release.
To this day, he remains in psychiatric care.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Moskvin
https://vocal.media/criminal/anatoly-moskvin-the-lord-of-the-mummies
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-15653074.amp
Lady Sleuths 
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