Anatoly Moskvin’s Doll Collection

Anatoly Moskvin is a Russian academic linguist from Nizhny Novgorod Russia. He was arrested in 2011 by police investigating a spate of grave desecrations in cemeteries in and around Nizhny Novgorod. 26 mummified bodies of young girls aged between 3 and 15 were found in his apartment. He exhumed the bodies and mummified them himself before dressing and posing them around his home which he also shared with parents who had mistaken the bodies for large dolls. Moskvin has stated that he felt great sympathy for the dead children and felt that they could be brought back to life by either science or black magic. He enclosed the remains in dolls in an attempt to give them functional bodies to be used when he eventually discovered a way to bring them back to life, feeling that their physical remains were too decayed and ugly for them to feel comfortable or happy. Moskvin denied any sexual attraction to the dolls and instead considered them to be his children. He would talk to and interact with the corpses, sing songs to them, watch cartoons with them, and even hold birthday parties and celebrate holidays for their benefit. After a psychiatric evaluation, in May 2012, That was ordered by the court, it was determined that Moskvin suffered from a form of paranoid schizophrenia and has since been held in a psychiatric hospital.

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