A Russian who has been obsessed with cemeteries since he was 12 dug up the bodies of 29 women, dressed them like dolls and put them on display in the three-room apartment he shared with his parents, authorities said.

Anatoly Moskvin, 45, was identified by Russian media as the serial grave robber whose ghoulish spree shocked police investigators in the Volga River city of Nizhny Novgorod.

Moskvin, described as a “genius” by neighbors, allegedly stole only the bodies of young women, ages 15 to 25, and carried their remains home in plastic bags.

Police yesterday released a video of his apartment, packed with the mummified remains of women dressed in bright dresses and head scarves.

Investigators said they found instructions for doll-making in the apartment, and the video showed old-fashioned plastic dolls in it as well.

Moskvin, a professional historian who reputedly speaks 13 languages, was widely known in the region as an expert on its cemeteries.

In a 2007 interview with the newspaper Nizhegorodsky Rabochy, he said he began wandering through graveyards when he was in the seventh grade.

Last month, he added in an article that his interest in the dead began when he was 12. He said 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 the publication Nekrolog.

He claimed that from 2005 to 2007, he had inspected 752 cemeteries across the region, often traveling about 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.

How cops tied him to the desecration of grave sites, which began at least a year ago, was unclear.

A Russian Web site, Lifenews, said his elderly parents had alerted police.

But the national daily Moskovsky Komsomolets said Moskvin was detained at a cemetery while carrying a bag of bones.

And Kriminalnaya Khronika, an online publication specializing in crime news, offered a third version: Investigators discovered the bodies when they visited Moskvin to consult with him about the desecration because he was an expert on cemeteries.

Alexei Yesin, the editor of a local newspaper to which Moskvin contributed, described him as a loner who had “certain quirks” but said he had given no indication that he was up to anything so strange.

“I saw no signs of that while working with him,” Yesin said.