If I Don’t Get Better Soon, all the Good Hobbies will be Gone

November 14, 2011

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve said I can count something on the fingers of one hand.

One of the greatest regrets and I’m sure a great source of my current consternation is just how limiting this whole situation has been. It’s going on 5 and a half years now that I’ve been relegated to spending my life in the cruising lane. Frustrating, because I should be in the passing lane, realizing my potential, trying my hand at everything I want to try… add to that the further frustration of having to read about people discovering hobbies that I had already planed to take up. It should be ME, getting the recognition not some Russian chap. As just one example, perhaps you read about this crafty fellow in Russia, a Mr. Anatoly Moskvin…

Anatoly, is a Russian historian who 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 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 shows his macabre collection of what look like dolls. They are dressed in bright dresses and headscarves, their hands and faces wrapped in what appears to be cloth. Police said they were human remains. Instructions for doll-making were found in the apartment

Russian media reports identified the 45-year-old historian who was considered the ultimate expert on cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod and 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. The national daily Moskovsky Komsomolets said Moskvin was detained at a cemetery while carrying a bag of bones 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 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.