Antoly Moskvin: A Man Who Turned Corpses into Dolls

Antoly Moskvin's mugshot from when he was arrested in 2011. Photo: ATI.

Antoly Moskvin is a Russian scholar whose loneliness and obsession with dead girls caused him to dig up dead bodies and mummify them in his apartment.

Who is Antoly Moskvin?

Antoly Moskvin was the go-to guy for all things cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia's fifth largest city. This polyglot spoke 13 languages, traveled the world, taught at college, and worked as a journalist. He even dubbed himself a "necropolyst". His colleagues all believed his work was very valuable.

Moskvin’s strange obsession with cemeteries started back in 1979 when he was just 13. In the last article he wrote for "Necrologies", a weekly publication dedicated to cemeteries and obituaries, he shared the story of how a group of men in black suits changed his life forever.

They were on their way to the funeral of 11-year-old Natasha Petrova and ended up dragging young Antoly to the coffin where they made him kiss the girl's dead body.

Anatoly Moskvin wrote that the dead girl’s mother put a wedding ring on his finger and made him kiss the girl over and over again.

Moskvin claimed that this strange incident lead to his fascination with the dead and his belief in magic.

His creepy fascination with the macabre influenced his studies and Moskvin eventually got a advanced degree in Celtic studies, a culture known for blurring the lines between life and death in their mythology. He was a language genius, speaking a total of 13 languages fluently, and was a well-published scholar.

In the meantime, Moskvin loved roaming from cemetery to cemetery. He claimed to know the region's dead better than anyone and visited a total of 752 cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod from 2005 to 2007.

He was consumed by the details and would delve into the history of those buried there. He claimed to walk up to 20 miles a day, sleeping on hay bales and drinking rainwater from puddles.

He even made a documentary series about his cemetery travels and discoveries called "Great Walks Around Cemeteries" and "What the Dead Said," which was published in a weekly newspaper. And if that wasn't enough, Moskvin even said he slept in a coffin for one night ahead of a funeral.

Antoly Moskvin’s “Dolls”

Footage of the “dolls” from inside Antoly Moskvin’s apartment

In 2009 locals began to discover the graves of their loved ones had been desecrated or even dug up.

Russian Interior Ministry spokesman Gen. Valery Gribakin told CNN that he believed some extremist groups were behind the incidents.

Graves continued to be desecrated for two more years with few leads to go on until a terrorist attack in 2011 lead police to Antoly Moskvin.

Police found a cemetery were someone had been painting over the photos of dead Muslims but not damaging anything else.

During their investigations into the cemetery police found Antoly Moskvin acting strangely and searched his apartment. What they found shook them to the core.

Antoly Moskvin shared an apartment with his elderly parents. Inside they found several life sized dolls. Upon closer inspection they realised that these were not in fact dolls but the mummified bodies of 29 women and girls aged between 3 and 25.

When the police checked one of the dolls, they were stunned to hear music playing. Moskvin had put music boxes inside many of the dolls' chests. The apartment was littered with photos and plaques taken from gravestones, maps of local cemeteries, and manuals for making dolls. The clothes the mummies were wearing were the same as what they had been buried in.

During the investigation, they found that Moskvin had placed music boxes or toys inside the bodies so they would make sounds when he touched them. Some of the mummies even had personal belongings and clothing, like a piece of a gravestone with their name on it, a hospital tag with the date and cause of death, and even a dried human heart.

Moskvin confessed to stuffing the decaying bodies with rags and wrapping nylon tights around their faces to make them look like dolls. He would also put buttons or toy eyes in the girls' eye sockets so they could "watch cartoons" with him.

Moskvin claimed he took the girl’s bodies because he was lonely and the Russian authorities wouldn’t let him adopt a child due to his low income (probably for the best).

Moskvin says he used a combination of baking soda and salt to preserve the girls. He treated them as his family and would even hold birthday parties for them.

Moskvin’s parents claimed to have no knowledge of what was really going on with the dolls, saying they thought they were just an innocent hobby.

Antoly Moskvin’s Sentencing

Antoly Moskvin in a Russian Jail. Photo Source.

Antoly Moskvin was charged with several felonies all relating to the desecration of graves. Moskvin confessed to 44 counts of desecrating dead bodies and graves in court. Disturbingly, when given a chance to speak he said to the victim’s parents, “You abandoned your girls, I brought them home and warmed them up.”

Anatoly Moskvin was sent to a psychiatric ward after being diagnosed with schizophrenia and sentenced. As of September 2018, he had the option to continue his treatment at home. But the families of his victims disagree and believe he should remain locked up for the rest of his life, with Natalia Chardymova, the mother of his first victim, leading the charge.

Do you think Antoly Moskvin should still be in jail? Let us know in the comments.

If you found this story interesting you might also be interested in Oxana Malaya: a girl raised by dogs, or the strange story of Barbora Skrlova: a 30 year old woman who managed to get adopted, claiming she was a 12 year old boy.