A ghoulish collection of necro-dolls gathered by an obsessive cemetery expert and uncovered by police has shocked residents of the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod. RT has obtained a copy of shocking footage made by police who searched his apartment.
Piles of gravestone plaques stocked on the shelves, maps of graves scattered around the tables, a bone here or there, or a skull – it can safely be said that the apartment’s owner, Anatoly Moskvin, is a big fan of cemeteries.But what tops it all is a personal harem of 29 female corpses aged 12 to 30 (age given at the moment of undertaking). Dressed in decrepit clothing, they are carefully set up in various poses throughout the three-room apartment.Mummified in full accordance with the manuals, some are clothed in doll-like dresses, while others feature a recording device embedded in the chest that plays children’s songs when touched.“When we were transferring one of the mummies, it startled us by starting to play the song, ‘Bear enjoys his honey.’ It took us some time to figure out that the mechanism inside reacts to touching,” one of the policemen working at the scene told Lifenews tabloid.Moskvin, 45, who holds a postgraduate degree in Celtic sciences and is respected in the scientific community, was arrested a week ago. He is accused of desecrating a number of local cemeteries and now faces a dozen charges, each punishable by a sentence ranging from a fine to three years behind bars.As the search at the site continued, a female foot in a lace stocking was discovered on Tuesday. So far none of the corpses have been identified, but forensics say they were disinterred from one to 15 years ago.The prosecution suspects Moskvin of digging up corpses by night and then transferring them home in sacks. Though the police spent more than a year searching for the cemetery vandal, there is no clear account as to how exactly they pinpointed Moskvin as the culprit. Some reports suggest that Moskvin was turned in by his own parents. Spending most of the year at their country house, the historian’s parents returned in autumn to find their son working on one of his ‘dolls.’ Another version is that the Nizhny Novgorod police themselves paid Moskvin a visit, with the intention of asking the biggest cemetery expert in the area for help with the case. In the event, they ended up discovering his dark secret by accident.One way or another, Moskvin’s legal prospects look grim, given that his fingerprints and footprints were matched with those found at the disturbed graves.Back in 2004, a string of desecrations hit the city’s cemeteries. Coffins of females were opened and the corpses stripped of clothes. The local media hinted that the vandal behind the acts could well be Moskvin.Helping the Komsomolskaya Pravda weekly with a journalistic investigation a year later, Moskvin provided a suspiciously detailed account of how a little girl – whose remains fell victim to the maniac – was dressed during her funeral, which happened nine years prior. But the fact failed to get any attention.
It all started with an occult ceremony
Moskvin’s deeply disturbed biography has many colorful pages, with the least interesting perhaps being his marital history. Having neither a wife, nor any kids, had had never moved out of the parental home. Neighbor Aleksandra Chistyakova described Moskvin’s parents as “decent people.”“We are barely acquainted with their son Tolya, but he always greeted me on occasional meeting,” she told NTV.A Komsomolkaya Pravda journalist who has worked with Moskvin claims the latter told him that it was a disappeared girlfriend that first drove him to investigate a cemetery.But Moskvin himself offered a completely different version in his only public interview.“When I was a pioneer in 1979, by pure accident, I took part in an occult ceremony that took place in a cemetery. I have been strongly drawn to these places ever since,” Moskvin told a local journalist, adding that he has visited 752 cemeteries.During his travels the historian suffered various hardships. He drank from puddles and slept in a coffin on more than one occasion. He also mentioned getting caught once with a fret saw in his bag and narrowly avoiding being beaten up by locals. However, in the interview he claims to have been using it to clear gravestone plaques in order to read them.