A MIDDLE AGED man, smart in a black overcoat and red velvet scarf but with an odd pudding bowl haircut, waved as my car drew up outside the Home for Incurable Mental Patients in the central Russian town of Yelets. He followed me down the corridors as Dr Stanislav Golipov showed me round the home.
Finally he introduced himself. "I am the silly Vnily Knyazev. I am a dissident," he said.
The doctor listened patiently as Mr Knyazev recounted his story. His unfaithful wife, who had wanted to get her hands on their flat, had had him committed to a mental hospital in the nearby town of Lipetsk. There, because he had sent letters of complaint to the Prosecutor in Moscow, the doctors had made a "false diagnosis" of schizophrenia and sent him to the home.
"They have put me in the mad house illegally," he said. "I am a normal person. I have higher education. I used to be a driver, first class. I used to drive lorries and cranes. Now I wash the floors here and feed the cows."
"He's bonkers," said the doctor when I asked afterwards for his opinion about Mr Knyazev. "He was violent to his wife. But he could be released if there was somebody to keep an eye on him. I have told him that if his brother comes to collect him, he can go.
But the brother does not come.
"He's not a poor man" the doctor added. "He brought several million roubles with him when he came to the home. But nobody cares about him".
Dr Golipov admitted that in communist times political dissidents were neutralised in mental hospitals, although he said he had not personally been involved in the abuse of psychiatry. "It mostly happened in Moscow. I was just a provincial doctor."
But since 1992, Russia has had a law making it impossible to commit a person without proper medical evidence and a court order. "If someone is here," the doctor said, "it is either because he is either a danger to himself or others ... or simply because he has no where else to go."
I saw some very severely handicapped people in the home, where the two bed rooms were basic but not significantly worse than those in many Russian hotels. In one room, two grossly deformed figures lay curled up on their beds. They looked like children but they were grown men. They were complete cretins, capable only of eating, urinating and defecating.
Yet in the television lounge I met Pasha and Petyn, more or less normal young men in their early 20s. Rejected by their parents, they had grown up in children's homes and then, at the age of 18, been transferred automatically to the mental home. "We call them carnival children in Russian," said the doctor. "The unwanted children of drunks."
Pasha, he said, was not very bright and became unruly if he drank alcohol. Petya's growth had been stunted. But they were capable of menial work and could have lived in society, if only anybody had wanted them.
There were other sad cases. Lyuba, a woman of about 50, had been raped as a teenager and subsequently, as the doctor put it, "gone mad for men". "I like wine and sex," she laughed. On the surface, I could not see much difference between her and myself, except that she was institutionalised in the home, never receiving a visit, and I was loved and free.
Then there was Pyotr Mikhialovich, a former military officer who had suffered a stroke. His wife claimed his pension but did not want the trouble of caring for him, the doctor said. And there was Sergei Skladchikov, who walks around dressed in the uniform of a railway guard. He heard voices but monthly injections kept them at bay. Nobody visited him either.
One patient, who asked not to be identified, took me on one side in the garden and complained that the director, the doctor and the nurses stole food and clothes donated for the patients. They also shut the patients up while they had drinking parties and made exclusive use of the sauna which was supposed to be for the inmates, he said. It may be true.
But Dr Golipov, who had short notice of my visit, not long enough to prepare a show, gave the impression that he genuinely cared for the patients. "They are rejected by their families, so I must be like a mother and father to them" he said.
Certainly this doctor, who began his career by treating psychiatric cases in the army, was not in the job for the money his salary was the equivalent of $100 per month.
I asked him if the inmates of the home were any more mad than the people outside. He laughed. "The whole of Russia is a giant lunatic asylum," he said, "but yes, my patients are madder in the sense that they lack commonly accepted logic, they suffer a disturbance of perception."
He asked me about the debate over euthanasia in the west, although he rejected the idea himself. "We are all from God. As long as there is life, there is hope of improvement," he said.
And he walked me to my car. The light of the short November day was fading and the inmates were already closed in for the night. At an upper window they stood in a row, waving.