The Man Who Made Real Living Dead Dolls

Written By: Karla Cortes

Edited By: Grave Reviews Staff

 

Anatoly Moskvin was a Russian author and linguist who also had a fascination with making Russian dolls. The twist in this story was that these dolls were made from the corpses of young deceased girls. Moskvin kept 26 (originally 29) life size dolls all of which consisted of the deceased girls ranging between the ages of 3 and 13 in his apartment located in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.  In 2011, he was arrested for desecrating upwards of 150 graves in Nizhny Novgorod and around Moscow. After choosing which girl best fit his needs, Moskvin would then use the corpses of young deceased girls to create life size Russian Dolls. These were true living dead dolls. Allegedly, Moskvin engaged in these activities for ten years and had preserved one corpse up to 9 years.  He would forever be known as “The Russian Doll Maker.”

Disturbing Childhood Incidents

Anatoly Moskvin, born to Yuri Fedorovich and Elvira Alexandrovna on September 1st, 1966, was raised in the Soviet Russian city of Golki, now known as Nizhny Novgorod. It is said that there have been two troubling incidents which occurred during his childhood and may have triggered his his psychotic tendencies.

In the first instance, allegedly, when Moskvin was in third grade, he arrived home covered in bruises one day which was the result of an encounter with an unknown man who had raped Moskvin during his walk. It is unclear as to whether or not Moskvin had told his parents, but it is assumed that they were not aware of the incident. At a young age, Moskvin’s parents knew him to be. This may have been the reason why they were unaware of this incident.

MOSKVIN WAS FORCED TO KISS AND MARRY A DEAD CORPSE

The second case occurred on March 4th, 1979 when Moskvin was 12-years old. At that time, he discovered his passion for the occult and the subject matter of death. During a wastepaper collection competition held by his school, Moskvin went out of the way to outdo his classmates by wandering into the yard of a stranger. Upon entering the yard, Moskvin was seen and targeted by two dozen people, all wearing long black robes and participating in a ceremony that emulated a funeral. When young Moskvin turned to retreat from the scene, one of the members grabbed him by the shoulder and insisted on Moskvin kiss a forehead of the dead 11-year-old Natasha Petrova who laid in the coffin.

Moskvin knew he had no choice but to kiss the deceased girl. He was then presented with two copper rings and was forced to put one of the rings on the girl and one on his finger in a bizarre marriage ceremony. As a result of this incident, Moskvin would experience strange dreams involving the dead girl, Natasha. Subsequent to these two incidents, Moskvin’s fascination with death grew exponentially.

 

Renowned Author and Intellectual

Later in life, Moskvin earned a degree in Celtic studies and then joined the society of Lucifarians, which praised the left-hand path that pushed him to perform rituals on dead animals. He obtained an extensive knowledge on cemeteries and claimed to have visited up to 752 of them in his hometown.

Moskvin was well known within academia and a renowned author. In addition, he became a linguist after attending the Institute of Foreign Languages and knew how to speak up to thirteen languages.

 

Living Dead Dolls

In 2011, an anti-Muslim terrorist attack occurred at an airport in Moscow, which was linked to some Muslim graves being desecrated and vandelized. Police quickly turned to Moskvin as a suspect and was subsequently investigated. Police arrived to his apartment not to find any anti-Muslim propoganda, but to find life size dolls carefully placed around the apartment.

Moskvin’s process of preserving the little girls was by covering their skin with baking soda and salt to dry the bodies. He would then leave the bodies in the cemetery for a few days before taking them to his apartment. There, he would wrap the bodies with strips of cloth to add fullness and would dress the bodies up in bright women’s clothes, placing wigs onto them and sometimes adding wax to their faces so that when hardened, he could paint life-like faces over it.

Moskvin would sometimes put bells or some sort of audible object inside the dolls to emit sound. He would even keep track of their birthdays and celebrate them. These were the true living dead dolls. As Moskvin later expressed in interviews, he had the dolls mainly out of loneliness. He cared deeply for the little girls and even stated to have felt sorry that the little girls were not alive. He had hoped that by the time science came around to reviving people, they could be rebirthed.

 

Incarceration and Psychiatric Treatment

After Moskvin’s arrest, he was charged for the desecration of graves and dead bodies which granted him five years in prison. During litigation, the Court ordered a psychiatric evaluation for Moskvin and it was later discovered that Moskvin suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. As a result, he was deemed unfit for a trial and was sentenced to coercive medical measures. Moskvin was removed from a psychiatric clinic, however, in 2015, a hearing would later approve the extension of his psychiatric treatment. Since then, every extension has been approved and he still remains in psychiatric treatment to this day.

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