Moscow: The Russian historian had always been open about his interest in the dead and eagerly described how he loved to rummage through cemeteries, studying gravestones to uncover the life stories behind them.
What he failed to mention, according to police, was that he had dug up 29 bodies and taken them back to his apartment, where he dressed them in women's clothes scavenged from graves and then put them on display.
A police video of the man's apartment in the Volga River city of Nizhny Novgorod released Monday shows his macabre collection of what look like dolls. Life-size, they are dressed in bright dresses and headscarves, their hands and faces wrapped in what appears to be cloth. Police said they were mummified remains.
Instructions for doll-making were found in the apartment, police said, and the video showed old-fashioned plastic dolls in frilly dresses lying about.
Loner
Police refused to name the suspect arrested last week, but released photographs of him, gave his age as 45 and described him as a well-known specialist in the history of the city about 400km east of Moscow.
Russian media reports identified the man as Anatoly Moskvin, a 45-year-old historian who was considered the ultimate expert on cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod.
Russian newspaper reports quoted police as saying that the man had only selected the remains of young women for his grisly collection.
Police said he had photographs and nameplates from grave sites, which could help with the identification of the remains.
The arrest followed a long-running investigation into the desecration of graves at several cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod beginning in 2010, police spokeswoman Svetlana Kovylina said. She did not explain how they tracked him down.
The national daily Moskovsky Komsomolets said Moskvin was detained at a cemetery while carrying a bag of bones. But Kriminalnaya Khronika, an online publication specialising in crime news from the Nizhny Novgorod region, said police investigators discovered the bodies when they visited Moskvin to consult with him about the desecration.
Alexei Yesin, the editor of a local newspaper to which Moskvin contributed, said that he was shocked by the reports and couldn't understand how he could have squeezed all the bodies into his apartment, which he shared with his parents.
He described Moskvin as a loner who had "certain quirks," but said he gave no indication that he was up to anything so strange. "I saw no signs of that while working with him," Yesin said in a telephone interview.
Linguistic expert
Moskvin, who long had been known in the region for his interest in the dead, wrote several articles about cemeteries and historic sites in the region. A linguistic expert by training, he specialised in Celtic culture and studied 13 foreign languages.
