Anatoly Moskvin (born September 1, 1966) — a Nizhny Novgorod historian-necropolist (cemetery researcher), professional traveler, local historian, journalist, magician, and necromancer.
Freelance contributor to the newspaper "Nizhegorodsky Rabochiy (Nizhny Novgorod Worker)."
A philologist by training. A polyglot who knows 13 foreign languages.
On principle, he neither smokes nor drinks alcohol.
He became known in non-academic circles following reports of the discovery in the apartment where he lived with his parents of approximately two dozen mummified remains of young girls dressed in fine clothes, with speech-simulating devices placed inside them.
Nature of the phenomenon
A necro-realist who came to the attention of law enforcement.
By his own description, an experienced pagan and a sufficiently convinced necromancer.
Interview with Anatoly Moskvin
— Anatoly, where does such an unusual interest come from?
— Even as boys we used to wander around the cemetery near where I live — the Red Etna plant is not far from there. We'd collect bottles, make bonfires — it was fun. It so happened that in 1979, when I was still a Young Pioneer, I found myself an unwitting witness and participant in a magical ceremony. From then on I was drawn there as if by a magnet. I got used to roaming cemeteries from about seventh grade, and it seems to me that no one in the city knows them better than I do. By the year 2000 I had thoroughly studied all the city cemeteries and many district ones.
— And how did you study them?
— I would come to the sites in summer, in the evening, when everything was quiet and calm — no guards, no vagrants, no militia, just a few dogs running around. With a little notebook and a pencil, and I'd work until dark. Truth be told, the militia don't often honor our city cemeteries with their presence — except for the lazier officers who drive their cars in there and sleep among the graves instead of patrolling the city at night. But that's only in summer. Guards weren't posted at our cemeteries until around 2005, after some witches in Sormovo dug up their girlfriends' graves. As if they'll actually guard anything.
— How many burial grounds have you managed to visit and survey?
— I calculated that over two and a half summers (I began work on July 18, 2005) I personally surveyed 752 cemeteries. I finished processing the field materials, and in addition transcribed 900 various verse epitaphs collected from across the Region — isn't that folklore? Believe me, it was very hard — personally scrambling through all thirty-five districts. While I'm still young and have the energy to clamber through rough terrain, I have to press on.
— How many kilometers did you cover each day?
— About thirty kilometers on average — the standard daily distance for a walking pilgrim. The greatest single day was when I walked from Ichalki (village) to Pochinki: that's from one district center to another. The bus runs only once a day, at 11 in the morning, which didn't suit me — I still had villages to survey along the way. At least it didn't rain. I arrived in Pochinki and fell asleep right on a bench — that's how exhausted I was. Then, late at night, I woke up and dragged myself into a stairwell. Looking back on all of it now, I can only smile fondly.
— How did you manage to survey 750 burial grounds in two and a half summers?
— With an enormous effort. My season begins as soon as the snow melts and ends when enough snow has fallen to cover the inscriptions — roughly from April 5 to December 1. I worked in a shuttle pattern: two or three days out in the villages, then two or three days to rest, process materials, and attend to other business. And so on for three years. What regular job, what personal life could there be? I was constantly occupied with the cemeteries, so much so that my legs were ready to fall off from all the walking. But at least I could read more than usual — you stride along a country road holding a book in front of you, bag over your shoulder, no one to see you, and you read until dark. Your legs walk across the earth while your eyes walk across the lines. In those three years I also managed along the way to write a book about Islam and am finishing work on a toponymic dictionary.
— Were there problems because of the weather?
— A great many. The summer of 2006 was exceptionally rainy; the summer of 2007 was dreadfully hot. Getting to any district center is no problem if you have the money. Finding a cemetery out in the fields is also manageable — our geodetic service finally published a topographic atlas, a 1:100,000-scale map, in 2005. The problems lie elsewhere. Rural intra-district buses run three times a day, sometimes only twice. There are many places where they don't run at all. Matching your schedule to theirs is difficult even when none of them has broken down, so most of the journey had to be done on foot. A car would hardly have helped either — many rural roads are in such a state that even a tractor would get stuck. Or you want to cut a corner — and you wade through a ford and across fields. Or there are no roads at all.
A great hindrance were bridges swept away by floodwaters that still appeared on the map but no longer existed in reality — for instance, the bridge across the The Piana River near the village of Akuzovo in Sergach District. In other places you have to cross rivers on a single plank, or simply wade or swim across. This usually happens on the boundaries between districts. Between Bykovka in Vorotynsky District and Ivanovskoye in Spassky District there is supposedly a bridge over the Urga River, but if only you could see that bridge…
And here, imagine: after enormous effort you make it to some remote village. You've just arrived, the sky fills with clouds, and the rain begins. For two or three hours. Even if you yourself aren't afraid of getting soaked, the pages of your notes stick together in your hands. Or the rain drenches you throughout another 8-kilometer stretch. A jacket helps only for the first hour, then it soaks through too. There's nowhere to shelter — you have to keep moving. And at that point the mud on the road causes your shoes to fall apart…
Heat is another problem. Rivers are not always nearby, and when they are, they are sometimes so overgrown with weeds and slime that you don't want to get in. Wells have dried up or fallen apart; water pumps don't work everywhere either — and you still have to reach the village first. There isn't always somewhere to buy a soft drink — the village shops are either closed for no stated reason, or it's already too late, or they don't exist at all. It got to the point where I was glad of a plastic bottle of dirty water left sitting in the sun by a grave. You pour the water straight over your head. It's hot and unpleasant. But when a little breeze comes, it gives you ten minutes of relief. Then the water doesn't even dry — it evaporates — and you start dreaming again of finding even the most miserable swamp along the way. That was how I surveyed, for example, Uchuyevsky Maydan in Pochinkovsky District.
I never thought I would drink from a muddy puddle. People told me that students on the virgin lands campaigns used to drink like that. It turns out — I can too. I was surveying the south of Pavlovsky District. The heat was over thirty degrees. Beyond the village of Frolovskoye there is an uninhabited village called Dubrovo. Surveying its cemetery, abandoned at the edge of a ravine, was essential. As was catching the last bus from Frolovskoye to Vorsma. On the way there I ran — I knew the road. On the way back I also ran, but my vision was already going dark. I could feel it: a little more and I would collapse — unless I found something to drink.
And then — oh, joy: a rut left by a tractor that had once been stuck in the mud. At the bottom a little water, with some kind of insects floating in it. I pulled off my shirt, as they taught us in the army, and drank, filtering the muddy liquid through the cotton cloth. Put it back on, ran again. I made the bus in the end, but had to wave my arms so it wouldn't leave without me. Before 2005 I had a thick head of hair — after three years of such adventures I began, as people told me, to go catastrophically bald, and my temples turned noticeably grey. Probably from the strain.
— And what about overnight accommodation?
— Mostly in stairwells. Who would let you in? And even if they did, I wouldn't go — it's dangerous to trust strangers. There are four types of overnight stay: in stairwells, in haystacks, in piles of sawdust, and in abandoned farm buildings. Forgive me — there is a fifth: in cemetery guardhouses, where they're unlocked. But they're not everywhere. Once I even slept in a coffin.
— How dreadful. And how did that come about?
— You see, in the Tatar villages of Sergachsky and neighboring districts, the guardhouses on Muslim cemeteries store everything needed for a burial — crowbars, shovels, and various other things. The locals don't take anything, and outsiders don't go there. I am the exception. It was a rainy August of 2006; I was surveying the south of Spassky District. The village of Tukay — before the war it was called Parsha. Toward evening, Spasskoye was far away and Sergach even farther. No hope of transport; a steady rain had set in. No haystacks to be seen in the vicinity either. Now, the Tatars in their guardhouses keep not only crowbars but also biers — wooden frames covered in green cloth with silver Quranic inscriptions.
The deceased is wrapped in sheets, and these frames are used as stretchers. They are stacked in layers in the little cemetery house. And its roof leaks. What was I to do? I thought: let this be not a coffin but a box. I lay down in one box and pulled another over myself from above. Fine — I didn't get wet. And I slept. And no one noticed.
Another time, in September of that same year. The village of Pozharki in Sergach District. I decided to spend the night on the spot rather than walk back to the district center. No stairwells, no haystacks. But a wide-open cemetery guardhouse with a sturdy roof. I lay down and spent the night. In the morning I was woken by the sound of shovels and cursing: right in front of the guardhouse, some men had decided to dig a grave. They were chopping through roots and swearing as if they were digging for something other than a person. I lay low and thought: they'll get distracted and I'll slip out. But it didn't work: after about half an hour one of them flung the door wide open. He was even more surprised than I was. Who are you? I said: I had nowhere to sleep — and slipped out through the open doorway. Fortunately, the gravediggers were not very drunk; they laughed among themselves and didn't bother to chase me.
— What adventures you have!
— Oh, there will be plenty to tell about this whole saga later on. I remember an episode in the village of Kamenishchi in Buturlin District. It was toward evening on a Saturday in June 2006. I was walking down the street when a drunken village wedding procession came straight at me. I could see them from a distance, but there was nowhere to turn — not a single side street. Turning back would have been worse: if you run, it means you feel guilty — a logic well known from primary school.
When the drunken group was still some distance away, I decided to duck aside — there were bricks stacked in front of one of the houses — and pretend to relieve myself, then wait for the dangerous company to pass before continuing on my way. This trick had worked many times before. This time my calculation proved wrong: the wedding party turned precisely toward that house, behind whose bricks I had planned to shelter. I barely managed to slip out of my hiding place and was, naturally, spotted. What entertainment for a dozen or so tipsy young men with not a single girl in sight. If I had been caught in a cemetery, the worst they could suspect would be that I was trying to steal scrap metal.
That suspicion is dispelled by a few questions and a quick search of one's bag — over three seasons I had been subjected to that humiliating procedure dozens of times. But if you are caught by unpleasant people in a village, they can accuse you — especially when drunk — of a far worse offense: planning to break into empty private homes. They grabbed me, shook out my bag, and found a chisel. I carry one so that I can dig out old stones that have sunk into the ground, and scrape the moss off those that I believe might still be legible. They wanted to beat me on the spot, on the strength of suspicion alone.
I barely managed to persuade the drunken crowd to hand me over to the village police officer. He assessed the situation, calmed his fellow villagers down, put me in his car — ostensibly to take me to the district militia station to sort things out, since I had my documents with me — drove me beyond the village outskirts, and let me go, with a strict order never to show my face in Kamenishchi on a Saturday again.
— So they didn't beat you after all?
— Not that time. I was beaten somewhere else — at the Southern Cemetery in the city of Pavlovo. It happened at the end of September of the same year, 2006. Dusk was already falling, and I was getting ready to head to the train and go home; it was the third and final day of the expedition. I noticed two young men of about twenty-five, rather more sober than one might expect, squatting beside a grave, with a girl beside them. The girl was crying quietly. I had a beard at the time and was dressed in black, so they took me for a priest. When you're drunk, as the saying goes, even a goat can look like the devil.
They called me over, and I approached. I was immediately asked to conduct a funeral service — as if that were even canonically possible — for a two-week-old baby girl, the daughter of those present, who had died two months earlier. Unbaptized, I should add. I quite reasonably pointed out that the Church does not permit this, and that I did not know the prayers — and was initially released with good grace. However, about ten minutes later the drunken men changed their minds and came after me. To my great regret, I failed to correctly gauge the degree of danger (the pair seemed to me excessively drunk rather than dangerously so), and I paid dearly for that misjudgment: the two of them cornered me among the grave enclosures, wrenched the bag from my hands, knocked me down, and pummeled my face with their heels. In the pencil case inside the bag they found unspent money — 350 roubles — and a watch, both of which my attackers took with them. What those men failed to account for was that I knew the cemetery inside out and had no trouble finding the relevant grave the next morning.
I had to pay a visit to the district militia station. When the investigator backed them into a corner, the two brother-degenerates — one had completed a full course at a school for the mentally handicapped, the other had managed seven years of a regular school — confessed to everything and returned the watch. There was a trial, and they were each sentenced to three years in a general-regime penal colony.
Incidentally, if there is not a single living soul within ten miles — that is also bad: you feel as if you are walking on the Moon. You can easily get lost, with no one to set you right, and wander off to the back of beyond. And then back again. Chronic depopulation traditionally afflicts the Gorodetsky District and Semyonovsky Districts.
— And is there anything positive?
— There is plenty of positive too. People say that under capitalism, man is a wolf to man. But in our villages, if they are not drunk, people live as they did under socialism. If you manage to get into a genuine conversation with them, they invite you in, into their homes, as guests. At the cemetery they press sweets and biscuits into your hands, one after another. I tell them I am not a homeless man, and they say: all the more reason — remember our loved ones. In the village of Stepanovo, in the Arzamas District, one old woman practically bowed to the waist before me. "What for?" I asked. "Because you are petitioning on behalf of ours," she answered.
But I petition not only for the people of Stepanovo or Arzamas — I petition for the whole Region. When drivers passed and saw me on foot, they often gave me a lift and never asked for money. With a people like that, you could still go on building communism. Once, in the Shatkovsky District, I was even given a ride by Gypsies, who made a special detour to the very village I needed to reach. Sometimes you spend the night in a stairwell; someone asks who you are, and they bring out sandwiches and tea: "Here, local historian, have something to eat — we can see how tired you are." But the main impression I took away from all these expeditions is that I saw with my own eyes how those who actually grow our bread live. Before that, being a city man, I had somehow imagined it ripened by itself in the fields, and all that was left for people to do was harvest it.
— And did you have any trouble with the militia?
— Rural militia, which is found only in district centres, is strict but fair. I noticed none of the lawlessness you sometimes encounter in cities. Yes, they may detain you at a railway station or a bus station, yes, they may invite you into their cubbyhole for a search, they may make a photocopy of your passport, they may leaf through your notebook full of field notes.[1] They may check on the computer whether you are on the federal wanted list. But they always let me go, and there was never a single attempt to rob me, insult me, or accuse me of anything. Well, I also tried not to break the law. Breaking it costs you more than it's worth.
— Anatoly, tell me — are there really no other ways to learn something about our ancestors? Is combing through cemeteries the only option?
— Believe it or not, in some cases there is no other way. Take our Region. Old newspapers can be read from about 1876 onwards — before that they consisted mainly of advertisements, commercial notices, and official announcements. Dates of birth and death may be garbled, as may ages — because in earlier times important items were transmitted by telephone or telegraph, and copy for the newspapers was written by hand. People's handwriting varies; a four looks like a nine, so what? There were also quite a few unscrupulous journalists, and there was a fashion for deliberately mangling surnames — in pursuit of some momentary interest that is no longer comprehensible to us. The pea-brained authors never stop to think that their newspapers with their garbled surnames will be preserved for centuries — if not in paper then in digitized form — and that if in a hundred years' time someone takes an interest in some incident from our day, getting to the truth will not be easy.
— But do serious scholars really write history from newspapers?
— From newspapers too. What are the alternatives? Interviewing living people — but people die off far too quickly, and old folk spin such yarns… The civil registry archives in this country, from 1917 onwards, are classified as a strict state secret; researchers are admitted even to obtain data on the victims of repression only… upon a written request from the relatives of those same victims. And what if someone has no surviving relatives, or all of them have long since been in Israel? Does that mean those victims of repression are simply not to be studied? Our archives are also in poor shape. Vetluga (disambiguation) burned in 1890 — all the archives for an entire district were destroyed.
The Kostroma archive burned in 1982 — documents covering an entire region went up in flames, a whole stratum of history — the director was given a two-year suspended sentence; they took pity on the woman, though the fault lay not so much with her as with a leaking roof. Sometimes a museum burns down too — in Sergach, in 1991. And here in our own city, the entire eighteenth century went up in smoke in 1923: the oldest files were dumped in one of the towers of the Kremlin and were pulled out through holes in the walls by the homeless people of the time. To keep warm, you see.
— And is there more information to be found in cemeteries?
— You can glean a few crumbs. Both archives and cemeteries in this country suffered greatly at the hands of the Bolsheviks. But if at least someone works on the archives, no one but me touches the cemeteries. Before the revolution, substantial monuments — the kind built to last centuries — were erected only for a chosen few: various aristocrats, wealthy men, village kulaks. From 1916 to 1954 there was not a single workshop in the city or Region that made gravestones — so Soviet people improvised as best they could. Some put up a wooden cross and chiseled the name and surname of their dear grandmother into it: it would stand forty years at most.
Others welded together a little iron pyramid with a star, others shaped a boulder or a block of limestone, and some simply helped themselves to ownerless monuments from old cemeteries. The pre-revolutionary surnames were hammered off or ground away and new ones chiseled in their place — a workshop of that kind opened in our city right after the war. Go to the Jewish section at Maryina Roshcha Cemetery — you will find a collection of pre-revolutionary granite monuments the like of which you won't see in Moscow. And not a single Orthodox surname: even Orthodox crosses were destroyed in that workshop.
So, if you walk through the old cemeteries with a notebook — in Bogorodsk, for instance, or in Gorbatov, in Bolshoye Murashkino, at the Tikhvin Cemetery in Arzamas — the list goes on — you can copy down information from the graves that exists nowhere in any archive.
— What sort of information, for example?
— Well, here is one example. Do you know the book Who's Who in Nizhny Novgorod Region, the edition from 2000? It contains entries on deceased residents of Nizhny Novgorod as well. And question marks: such-and-such a church hierarch was born in 1875 — but when did he die? How many archives would you have to dig through to find that out? Or consider this: somewhere in a village called Sharapovo there lived an educated landowner who collected books and bought up paintings. He died, his entire estate was sold at auction. Then those books start turning up at second-hand booksellers, collectors begin to take an interest — and who was this Yegor Alexeyevich, say, Kryukov, and when exactly did he live? How much time would you have to spend in archives? Or someone could simply go to that very Sharapovo and look in the village cemetery — perhaps a monument has survived: it has been known to happen.
Things can go another way too. Say a petty townsman named Chumichenko lives in some small town, having distinguished himself in no particular way. A son is born, goes off to serve in the Red Army, is captured by the Fascists, then ends up in a concentration camp, survives, stays in the West, becomes a prominent avant-garde artist. Here at home, of course, his surname is suppressed for decades — what else would you expect. New times come, the artist dies, and biographers set about constructing his biography. They write to that small town: please help us trace his ancestors. But either all the archives were taken away by the NKVD in their day, or the ones that remain are in such disorder that a century would not suffice to sort through them. Bear in mind that this is in our own Region, which was never under Fascist occupation. When there is a fatal shortage of information, cemeteries can sometimes help.
Or here is another unexpected angle. Serious researchers decide to write a study on child mortality. Before the revolution everything was relatively straightforward — you took the church registers, counted how many children were born and how many died, and calculated the difference. The problems begin under Soviet power, since everything is still kept secret from the people. Before the revolution they wrote plainly: in such-and-such a month in the city, so many were born, so many died, so many of them children. With statistics broken down by cause of death. In the USSR all of that became "forbidden," while children went on dying like flies. You can, of course, arm yourself with a pile of letters of authorization from your academic supervisor and begin making the rounds of archive offices begging for help.
But bureaucrats are bureaucrats — it is always easier to refuse than to fetch out archival folders. Here a form is not filled in correctly, there a deadline has passed, in another place the research topic is not formulated precisely enough, elsewhere the files for certain years are stacked away. Here the director is on leave and no one else can authorize access. By the time the director returns from leave, all submission deadlines will have passed. Or you can do something far simpler: go to the cemetery and simply count the deceased — everything is there in plain sight. In the last instance mentioned, that is precisely what had to be done.
— And what have you personally managed to find?
— It was not for nothing that I mentioned Who's Who. There was a historian and linguist in our city, a Czech by nationality, Fyodor Rzhiga. He was born in 1848 — but when did he die? The reference book has a question mark. I have a handwritten register of graves at Bugrovsky Cemetery, where a little plaque once recorded "1848–1925." Though later I found an obituary in Gorkovskaya Kommuna (newspaper). The date on the grave was wrong, as it turned out, since the scholar died on 5 March 1926. I tend to trust newspapers more, even though everyone makes mistakes. The grave, being ownerless, was cleared away in the post-Soviet period.
His wife is also buried there, along with a son; the wife died in 1942. She was a prominent bibliographer who, before the war, compiled reference guides on Maxim Gorky. They had no children. The administration at Bugrovskoe, one imagines, reckons: well, more than fifty years have passed — let's sell this plot again. Who Rzhiga was is of no concern to them; they have a whole cemetery full of people like him. And the burial records before 1956 have not survived — before that date you could demolish any grave you liked. That this man and his wife are listed in Who's Who is unknown to them.
— What other stories can you recall?
— Nowadays an enormous number of people have rushed to search for their roots, and the services of a specialist in cemetery studies are exactly what they need. Many times I have sat in the Regional library and watched people struggling, leafing through old newspapers. They come all the way from Moscow. We get talking: they are looking for their ancestors, going through the obituaries. "Where are your ancestors from?" "From Abaimovo, that's in the Sergach District." "Do you think you'll find something?" "We hope so." "But no newspapers were published in Sergach (disambiguation) before the revolution." "We know, but we very much want to find something." "Have you tried going to Abaimovo?" "Do you think there's any point?" There is a point: no more than five percent of pre-revolutionary noble and clerical graves have survived, but five percent is not zero, is it? Residents of Nizhny Novgorod have better odds — but even they will need to spend a long time poring over newspapers.
— How many people have you recorded in the course of your wanderings through the graveyards so far?
— At least ten thousand, and the mournful list grows every day. Only yesterday, for instance, I learned that on 19 May 1925 the local kulaks of Uzhovka drowned a Komsomol member named Pavel Kolesov in the river. He was an accordion player who used to sing obscene songs about Christ and the Mother of God to accordion accompaniment. Someone took exception to this. His accordion, incidentally, remains a sacred relic of the Pochinki local history museum — at least it was in 1988; by now it may well have been stolen.
— Has anyone in Russia studied cemeteries before you?
— Only under the Tsar. One grand duke — a brother of Nicholas II — had seen in his time how cemeteries in France are documented and organized, and decided to do something similar in Russia. The Romanov dynasty had money. In 1906 they found two dedicated enthusiasts, Modzalevsky and Saitov, and tasked them with seeking out notable graves in the cemeteries of Moscow as it then was. Their findings filled three volumes, which were subsequently published at imperial expense. They then turned to Saint Petersburg — work there took three years and produced four volumes. Those were also published before the revolution. The next item on the agenda was the provinces. Two enthusiasts were not nearly enough for fifty or so governorates, so to collect data on provincial deceased the grand dukes chose a different approach.
— What approach was that?
— Since there were no civil registry offices before the revolution and it was the priests who kept records of the dead, it was decided to turn to them. In 1909 the Holy Synod sent instructions to the consistory of each governorate, requiring local clergymen to make a record of notable deceased in their own parishes and submit these lists to the governorate, which would then forward them to the capital. It was a splendid initiative — only, in our typically all-Russian fashion, the circulars were sent out in the depths of winter, when you cannot get to a grave, let alone around a cemetery, through deep snow. Out of the entire governorate, about five people responded, and there the matter rested. The necropolis commission was busy with the Saint Petersburg volumes and was not greatly troubled by its winter failure. When work on the seven-volume set was completed — by 1912 — a second request for provincial materials was sent out, this time in summer. The results were considerably better: several hundred parishes in our governorate responded.
For convenience, all of Russia was divided into four parts by compass direction, and work began on processing the lists from the northern governorates. These were duly published in 1914 as yet another fat volume; anyone interested may consult it in the rare books department of the Nizhny Novgorod Regional Academic Library — it is entitled Provintsialny Nekropol (The Provincial Necropolis). The compilers moved on to the southern governorates — whereupon wars, strikes, shortages, soaring prices, and then the revolution intervened. From June 1917 the person responsible for the all-Russian cemetery project stopped receiving payment, with the result that work ground to a halt. The Bolsheviks consigned all unpublished materials to the archive, to the personal collection of the grand duke who was shot in 1919 — and left them to rest there for nearly a century.
— And what happened then?
— Nothing good. Some of the index cards ended up in one place, some in another; certain lists had been destroyed before the revolution, others survived. There are errors everywhere, as well — masses of them. Our village of Vazyan was read as Vargan — you can't tell from Petersburg what anything is called out here. Our governorate was actually fortunate: no one had gotten around to it before the revolution, so no one had gone through and culled the lists, and they came down to us exactly as they were submitted nearly a hundred years ago. A researcher from Saint Petersburg, Dmitry Shilov, took up this project, wrote a dissertation on it, and defended it in 2004.
This man, not being a resident of Nizhny Novgorod, nonetheless took the trouble to type out on a computer two thick folders of our — Nizhny Novgorod — deceased, and sent all these materials, entirely free of charge, on a floppy disk to Yury Galay, the doyen of our local historians, so that we might publish them. Along with them, by way of a specimen, a slim booklet — published analogous lists for Perm Governorate. We looked at it, smirked, and said: no, we won't publish it like that — we respect ourselves rather more than the Permians respect themselves.
I went to Moscow, familiarized myself with the dissertation in the original, and learned a great deal of interest from it. It offers the sensible advice to tackle the work on three fronts simultaneously: to study and verify the 1912 lists, to visit all the sites mentioned in person, and to work through the local press over a hundred years. Then to bring it all together in one book, so that no one in this city would ever again need to pore over old newspapers — they could simply take one volume and quickly find accessible information on any surname or any village. When the printed version is ready, we shall send a copy to each of the neighbouring regions — let them learn how it should be done, let them find their own enthusiasts, and let them do the same.
— What are your plans going forward?
— To finish the book about cemeteries. I will continue working on the dictionary of Nizhny Novgorod toponymy — I am doing that together with a co-author. I will go to Moscow to look through the newspapers they don't have here. And in addition I am working in other areas as well — I am, after all, primarily a linguist.
— I wish you good health and every success!
recorded by Tatyana Kokina-Slavrina
The Dead Bride of Anatoly Moskvin
A mystical story told by the local historian and cemetery specialist himself
In the summer of 2011, Nizhny Novgorod lawyer Alexey Yesin founded a newspaper called Nekrolog (Obituary), in which he publishes weekly lists of Nizhny Novgorod residents who have died during the preceding week, along with obituaries and local-history material on related subjects. In the issue of 26 October 2011, local historian and cemetery specialist Anatoly Moskvin recounted the story that began his unusual passion for cemetery research. I reproduce it here.
"On 4 March 1979, our school No. 184 was engaged in collecting waste paper. We went from entrance to entrance, rang every doorbell, and demanded old paper for the third brigade. Near one of the entrances stood a coffin lid: the day before, we had already been told that a girl from the neighboring school had died.
This is what had happened. Eleven-year-old Natasha Petrova was taking a bath when the electricity went out. The girl's father, Anatoly, had died back in 1971, so there was no man's hand in the flat, and the women used an old-fashioned extension cord. Shortly afterward the power came back on. As Natasha was stepping out of the bath, the end of her wet towel touched an exposed wire and she was killed instantly by the electric shock.
…Coming out of the entrance with armfuls of waste paper, we walked straight into the funeral procession. Natasha's mother was evidently a member of some sect. To begin with, none of her classmates were at the funeral, but several dozen men and women in black had come. They all held lit candles and were chanting something in a mournful, droning way — not in Russian.
Feeling that we had committed a crime — for we had stolen someone else's waste paper — we tried to make ourselves scarce from that frightening place. Several men spotted us and gave chase. Before long, one of them grabbed me by the shoulder. Shaking with fear, I was brought before the black assembly. The singing stopped.
A tearful woman — evidently the dead girl's mother — gave me a large Hungarian apple and kissed me on the forehead. She led me to the coffin and, promising me many sweets, oranges, and money, told me to kiss the deceased. I burst into tears and begged to be let go, but the sectarian women were insistent. Everyone started singing the prayers in an unintelligible language again, and some adult forcibly bent my head down toward the waxy brow of the girl in her lacework bonnet. I had no choice but to kiss where I was told.
I did so once, then again, then a third time; they encouraged me and told me to repeat after the prayer-reader a long incantation in archaic Russian. Several phrases from it are burned indelibly into my memory: "I who could bring forth a daughter, I can ward off all misfortune."
When the ritual was over, I was told to take a candle and drip wax onto the chest of Natasha's blue dress with its red trim. Then two worn copper rings were handed to me; I was told to place one on the dead bride's finger, and the other was placed on mine. Without releasing my hand, they moved toward the bus. We set off for the cemetery. On the way, a woman made me give my solemn Pioneer's word that I would not tell anyone about this incident for at least forty days.
The first clod of clay was thrown by the mother; the second I was told to throw myself. Then they drove us back to the same entrance, and my schoolbag was returned to me, stuffed with various handkerchiefs and rags. My pockets were filled to the brim; I was given a string bag of fruit and a ten-ruble note. At the very first turn I threw the little ring and the handkerchiefs into the snow. With the ten rubles I bought books about animals and Mongolian stamps.
Toward the end of the school year, dead Natasha began appearing in my dreams almost every night, singing tuneless little songs. My dead bride then began demanding — in my dreams — that I take up the study of magic, and promised to teach me everything. All she required was my consent. Naturally, I refused. In the summer I went to the countryside, and the nightly "visits" ceased.
They resumed on the very first night after I returned to the city. Natasha would appear to me as though through a haze, and before long I began to sense her presence by a peculiar chill. I started having hallucinations and began to rave at night. The doctor my parents turned to for help explained this phenomenon as hormonal turbulence.
This went on for about a year. At last, Natasha announced that if I still refused to study magic after all this, she was leaving me. She implied that I would eventually seek her out and beg her, but by then it would be too late. Back in 1980, I was willing to do anything to rid myself of the nightly torment. Natasha taught me how to "transfer" her to one of my classmates against whom I held a grudge. I performed a simple magical ceremony — and parted with Natasha Petrova forever, receiving in return… an inordinate amount of attention from that very classmate.
Ever since, whenever I find myself at the Krasnaya Etna Cemetery, I make time to visit Natasha's grave. Her grandmother passed away in 1990, her mother disappeared somewhere, and for about fourteen years I alone kept the grave in order. A couple of years ago someone placed flowers on Natasha's mound. Who could have done this besides me remains a complete mystery.
And yet my strange "marriage" to Natasha Petrova turned out to be useful. When, during the Perestroika era, I finally decided to study magic, knowledgeable people agreed to teach me as soon as I told them this story. By the time I had become a committed pagan and a sufficiently experienced necromancer, I regretted not having taken advantage of the esoteric knowledge that had been so readily offered to me in childhood."
a website of original publications by journalist Tatyana Kokina-Slavina
The Mummy Case
According to www.kriminalnn.ru, on November 2, officers from the Center "E" (the unit combating extremism) of the Main Directorate of the Interior Ministry of the Russian Federation for Nizhny Novgorod Region discovered approximately twenty mummified bodies of young women in the apartment of Anatoly Moskvin. The bodies are believed to have been exhumed from graves at various cemeteries. An investigation into the matter is currently underway.
Moskvin, a trained philologist, had been a freelance contributor to the newspaper Nizhegorodsky Rabochiy (Nizhny Novgorod Worker) since 2006, publishing articles twice a week about the history of local cemeteries. The articles attracted considerable attention, and Moskvin was regularly invited to various organizations to lecture on his unusual hobby — necropolis studies. He also helped people locate the graves of their relatives.
For three summers — from 2005 to 2007 — Moskvin undertook excursions to cemeteries across 35 districts of the region. His health deteriorated markedly: he went gray and began losing his hair at an alarming rate. According to the researcher, the work was conducted with the financial support of a well-known Nizhny Novgorod local historian and publisher. In time, the two partners planned to produce a unique book, "The Nizhny Novgorod Necropolis."
As Moskvin himself recounted, over the course of his life he had visited 750 cemeteries, copied 900 epitaphs from headstones, and compiled a card index of 10,000 graves. The roots of his fascination went back to Anatoly's childhood, when he and his friends would go for walks at the Krasnaya Etna Cemetery. In 1979, Moskvin became an unwilling witness and participant in a mysterious magical ceremony (described in detail in issue No. 30 of the newspaper Nekrolog). From that point on, he admitted, he was drawn to cemeteries as if by a magnet, and by 2000 he knew all the city cemeteries and many district ones extremely well.
Personally, Anatoly struck me by his fanatical devotion to necropolis studies. He told me he walked 30 kilometers a day, crossed rivers on a pole or waded through them on foot. So as not to waste time, he would read while walking between sites. He slept wherever he could — on benches, in building entryways, in haystacks, on abandoned farms, and often in the cemeteries themselves. Once he even spent the night in a coffin! When there were no settlements for a long stretch, he drank water from puddles.
According to Moskvin, the forces of law and order would sometimes take an interest in him. He was suspected of vandalism, of stealing non-ferrous metal. But he was always released:
"Rural militia is strict but fair. Yes, they might detain you at a railway station or a bus terminal, yes, they might invite you into their little office for a search, they might photocopy your passport, they might leaf through the notebook with my field research. They might run a check to see if I'm on the federal wanted list. But they always let me go, and not once did anyone try to rob me, insult me, or accuse me of anything. Well, and I tried not to break the law either. Breaking it is more trouble than it's worth."
In 2006, two visitors to the Southern Cemetery in Pavlovo attacked and beat the local historian. Moskvin saw to it that his assailants were punished: both received three-year sentences.
In addition to his necropolis work, Anatoly — a trained philologist — taught himself 13 languages. He earned extra money tutoring students and writing coursework papers and degree dissertations. On principle, he neither smoked nor drank. By his own account, he had never been married. In recent years he often expressed regret that he had no children. He lived on Lenin Avenue with his parents.
At present, according to unofficial reports, Moskvin has been detained and is being held at the Sormovo District Police Station. His fellow local historians — among them Aleksey Yesin, editor of the newspaper Nekrolog — are confident that everything will be cleared up in time and that Moskvin will be found to have broken no law.
Interesting Facts
- By the age of 45, Anatoly Moskvin had learned 13 foreign languages.
- He does not smoke or drink alcohol on principle.
- According to the news portal Newsru, law enforcement agencies in Nizhny Novgorod are for now declining to comment on the circumstances of the detention (archive) of the local historian, stating that they will explain everything after "the high-ranking guests expected in our city on November 4 have departed."
The Crazed Dollmaker Showed New Film Releases to Singing Skeletons
A Nizhny Novgorod local historian made musical boxes from the mummies of Muslims (VIDEO). The crazed dollmaker showed new film releases to singing skeletons
Nizhny Novgorod, November 11 (Novy Region, Aleksey Usov) — A Nizhny Novgorod local historian who was working on a guidebook to the city's cemeteries has been arrested for the desecration of Muslim graves.[2] Police found 29 mummies in the researcher's apartment. The cemetery enthusiast had been digging up well-preserved bodies of young women and girls and fitting them with musical boxes "so they could sing." In the evenings he would seat the singing corpses in front of the television and put on cartoons and educational films. Over the course of several years, the dollmaker ransacked around 150 graves.
Nizhny Novgorod police arrested local historian and cemetery expert Anatoly Moskvin. The 45-year-old researcher confessed to desecrating more than one hundred and fifty Muslim graves.[3] Twenty-nine mummies were found in his apartment, dressed in half-rotted girls' dresses, blouses, and skirts. According to Moskovsky Komsomolets, visiting the "crazed dollmaker's" apartment was a harrowing ordeal for the police officers. The nightmarish scene of mummified, singing corpses arranged in front of a television still haunts them. Particularly the moment when operatives from the anti-extremism unit tried to move one of the mummies and it suddenly, to their horror, began playing a children's song: "Mishka loves honey very much." It turned out there was a musical box inside it. After that search, the officers cannot even look at shop-window mannequins.[4]
Police identified the researcher through their investigative work. The thing was that from spring onward, Muslim graves at virtually all of Nizhny Novgorod's cemeteries had been vandalized. The faces of the deceased had been covered with newspaper, and their names painted over in black. At the time, both law enforcement officials and representatives of the Muslim community suggested that the culprit must be someone with at least some knowledge of Islam, since certain Islamic teachings prohibit leaving images of the deceased or their names on headstones. The grave desecrations continued regularly. Every week several more graves fell victim to the vandal's hands. Nizhny Novgorod police patrolled all the cemeteries every night. The operational work carried out in connection with the desecrations eventually led police to the local historian, and a subsequent search of his apartment uncovered the dolls.[4]
Forty-five-year-old Moskvin had led an unremarkable life and had never previously attracted the attention of law enforcement. In the 1990s he studied at Moscow State University, graduated from the philology faculty, and enrolled in postgraduate study. He began writing a dissertation at the Department of Germanic and Celtic Philology but never defended it. According to Professor Tatyana Mikhailova of that department, who spoke to journalists from Komsomolskaya Pravda, the work was superficial: "He had written some nonsense in there." "It was not a scholarly piece of research — a very superficial work with an enormous number of errors. There was nothing good in it," the professor recalled. Only two things distinguished the future dollmaker's sole academic endeavor: the dissertation had been typed on the backs of district Communist Party committee letterhead, and it was permeated throughout with an anti-Christian spirit.
The author had confided to the department that he was a committed Luciferian. "The idea of this movement is that one of God's helpers brought light to humanity. In Christianity, that is Lucifer. Adherents of certain religions hold that man must be shielded from this light, the light of knowledge. And the people who tasted the fruits of knowledge were expelled from paradise. He considers himself one of those people — cast out of paradise... He always talked nonsense. About black magic, about using dead animals in rituals," the professor told journalists.
Back in his native Nizhny Novgorod, Anatoly Moskvin devoted himself to the study of cemeteries. He published articles about cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod Region in the local press and was also planning to publish a guidebook to the graveyards. He handled the bodies of the young women and girls he exhumed from graves with great care. He selected them carefully, taking only those that were well preserved. From the remains he fashioned dolls into which he inserted musical boxes. The bodies were dressed in women's clothing, also retrieved from graves. In the evenings the necromaster would arrange his dolls in front of the television and show them new cartoons and feature films. Notably, the 45-year-old local historian lived with his parents. He told them that the singing dead girls were needed for his research.
According to one version, the local historian had not in fact specifically targeted Muslim graves: his main selection criteria were the "freshness" of the burial, and the sex and age of the "subjects." But it happened that this very year Nizhny Novgorod had seen a wave of vandalism at city cemeteries: radical Islamists were painting over photographs on the headstones of "their own," or ransacking the graves of Tatars, Bashkirs, and other members of "traditionally Muslim nationalities" who had converted to Orthodox Christianity and been buried beneath a cross. According to this version, local law enforcement — by attributing to Moskvin the desecration specifically of Muslim graves — is attempting to present as solved a sensitive and "politically delicate" case.
Moskvin was charged under the article on "desecration of the bodies of the deceased and the places of their burial," and the court remanded him in custody."[6]
Nov 7, 10:37 AM EST
MOSCOW (AP) -- Russian police discovered 29 mummies at the home of a well-known local historian who dug the bodies up from cemeteries and dressed them in clothes scavenged from graves, they said Monday.
A police video of the man's apartment in the Volga River city of Nizhny Novgorod shows a gruesome tableau of what looks like dolls - dressed in bright dresses and headscarves, some with their hands and faces appearing to be wrapped in cloth. Police said they were mummified remains.
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 400 kilometers (250 miles) 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, and who had spoken openly about rummaging through cemeteries and studying grave stones to uncover the Life Magazine's Volga Voyage, 1958 stories behind them.
Russian newspaper reports quoted police as saying that the man had only selected the remains of young women for his grisly collection.
The arrest followed a long-running investigation into the desecration of graves at several cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod, 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 specializing 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.
Moskvin, who long had been known in the region for his interest in the dead, wrote several articles about cemeteries in the region. A linguistic expert by training, he specialized in Celtic culture and studied 13 foreign languages.
In a 2007 interview with the newspaper Nizhegorodsky Rabochy, or Nizhny Novgorod Worker, Moskvin said he had inspected 752 cemeteries, often traveling some 30 kilometers (20 miles) a day by foot.
He said he drank from puddles, spent nights in haystacks or at abandoned farms and once even slept in a coffin readied for a funeral. He said he was repeatedly questioned by police, who then always let him go.
Just last month, he wrote a piece for a publication on necrology to explain his interest in the dead. He said that when he was 12, he came across a funeral procession whose participants forced him to kiss the face of a dead 11-year-old girl. He said he later grew interested in the occult."
Police: Russian man kept 29 mummified bodies
MOSCOW (AP) — The Russian historian had always been open about his interest in the dead and eagerly described how he loved to rummage through cemeteries, studying grave stones to uncover the Life Magazine's Volga Voyage, 1958 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. Lifesize, 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.
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 400 kilometers (250 miles) 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 specializing 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, told The Associated Press 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.
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 specialized in Celtic culture and studied 13 foreign languages.
In a 2007 interview with the newspaper Nizhegorodsky Rabochy, or Nizhny Novgorod Worker, Moskvin said he had begun wandering through cemeteries when he was in the seventh grade. "I don't think anyone in the city knows them better than I do," he said.
Moskvin claimed that from 2005 to 2007 he had inspected 752 cemeteries across the region, often traveling about 30 kilometers (20 miles) a day by foot.
He said he drank from puddles, spent nights in haystacks or at abandoned farms and once even slept in a coffin readied for a funeral. He said he was repeatedly questioned by police, who then always let him go.
Just last month, he wrote a piece for a publication on necrology to explain his interest in the dead. He said that when he was 12, he came across a funeral procession whose participants forced him to kiss the face of a dead 11-year-old girl.
"An adult pushed my face down to the waxy forehead of the girl in an embroidered cap, and there was nothing I could do but kiss her as ordered," Moskvin wrote in Nekrolog.
He said he later grew interested in the occult.
Russia's Interior Ministry says police have arrested a man who kept 29 mummified bodies at his apartment and dressed them up like dolls
MOSCOW (AP) — Russia's Interior Ministry says police have arrested a man who kept 29 mummified bodies at his apartment and dressed them up like dolls.
Ministry spokesman Valery Gribakin said Monday that the suspect from the Volga River city of Nizhny Novgorod dug up the bodies at several cemeteries in the region. The man, whose identity was withheld, dressed them in clothes dug up from the graves.
Gribakin said that the suspect is a historian who has authored several books. He said the arrest followed a police probe into the desecration of graves in the region, which was initially blamed on extremist groups. Nizhny Novgorod is located about 250 miles (400 kilometers) east of Moscow.
Russian media reports quoted police as saying that the man had selected only the remains of young women for his grisly collection.
Publications by Anatoly Moskvin
Prof. Mikhaylova, Moscow State University
"The parents, who also lived in the same apartment, were told by the 45-year-old scholar that he needed the mummies for his academic work. But what kind of work, exactly?
As a reminder, the scholar was detained in his own apartment, where he had constructed a veritable crypt. He had dressed 29 female corpses in gowns and fashioned them into dolls.
Anatoly Moskvin, the 45-year-old resident of Nizhny Novgorod who became notorious for his strange attachment to the remains of the dead, caused such a sensation and has been persistently called a scholar — yet he never actually became one.
In the 1990s, Moskvin sought to defend an academic degree at the country's leading university — Moscow State University. In 1992 he enrolled in postgraduate study at the philology faculty. He undertook to write a dissertation at the Department of Germanic and Celtic Philology. We spoke with his supervisor, Professor Tatyana Andreyevna Mikhaylova. At the time, Irina Aleksandrovna Yershova worked with Moskvin directly — she, unfortunately, passed away several years ago. But Tatyana Andreyevna remembers the peculiar postgraduate student well.
— First, Irina Aleksandrovna told me about him. He studied the English language and its history, but his real interest was Celtic studies. The dissertation topic concerned Celtic-Germanic contacts. He did finish the dissertation. It was quite substantial in volume; he printed it on a dot-matrix printer on the backs of district Communist Party committee forms. Rather odd. Why did he choose those? He made a strange impression in general.
— And what exactly was strange about him?
— An inability to listen, vague and drifting movements, an odd look in his eyes. One elderly woman said she could not forget his dark gaze — though I didn't notice it myself.
— He never defended the dissertation, as I understand it. Why not?
— There were some foolish things written in it. He realized that himself later on. It was not a scholarly study — a very superficial piece of work with an enormous number of errors. There was nothing good in it. What struck me was how he reviled Christianity in the text. He confessed to Irina Aleksandrovna that he belonged to a society more properly called not Satanist but Luciferian. The idea of this society is that one of God's helpers brought light to humanity — in Christianity, that is Lucifer. The followers of certain religions hold that humanity must be shielded from this light, the light of knowledge. And the people who tasted the fruits of knowledge were cast out of paradise. He considers himself one of those people. Cast out of paradise.
— Did you have any contact with him after that?
— He would appear at the department from time to time and try to give presentations, but they were not serious. He always talked nonsense — about black magic, about using dead animals in rituals.
— Do you think his Satanism and what he did are connected in some way?
— You know, possibly, yes. Perhaps he believed that the god Lucifer would bring the mummies back to life and they would walk out into the streets. Or perhaps, out of loneliness and a sense of being unrecognized, he simply created a world of his own.
Yesterday, Nizhny Novgorod investigators conducted a forensic re-enactment at the Novosormovskoe Cemetery — the largest in Europe. Police were attempting to establish all the circumstances under which the necropolist Anatoly Moskvin had dug up the bodies of girls from their graves. The officers examined the graves until late at night, even after the cemetery had already been closed to visitors. According to unverified information, Anatoly Moskvin himself was present — he pointed out the graves he had once opened "for research purposes."
See also
Sources
- ru.openlist.wiki — Open List (Memorial database), entry from the Book of Memory of the Republic of Mordovia — Menshoikin Matvey Fyodorovich (1897)
- ru.openlist.wiki — Open List (Memorial database), entry from the Book of Memory of the Republic of Mordovia — Menshoikina Matrena Pavlovna (1881)
- ru.openlist.wiki — Open List (Memorial database), entry from the Book of Memory of Nizhny Novgorod Region — Turshatov Fyodor Maksimovich (1904)
- ru.openlist.wiki — Open List (Memorial database), entry from the Book of Memory of the Republic of Mordovia — Erzyukova Matrena Andreyevna (1888)
- ru.openlist.wiki — Open List (Memorial database), entry from the Book of Memory of Samara Region — Yamusheva Kseniya Makarovna (1895)