Vera Shengelia is a Russian journalist, a mental health activist, and a trustee at the Moscow-based Life Route Foundation, which provides assistance to teenage and adult disabled persons. For the past several years, Shengelia told RuNet Echo, she’s been helping one disabled young man in particular, whose relatives had him committed and placed in a psychoneurological center. She used to visit him at a facility outside Moscow, but he was recently transferred to a clinic in the city.

Last week, Shengelia saw this man at his new home, where the living conditions startled her. On March 16, she described the experience on Facebook, drawing more than 450 shares and 1,700 reactions. RuNet Echo presents that text below, translated into English.

I can’t count how many times I’ve been to discussions and roundtables about the “Soviet Man,” where we examine his cultural code, his values, and all that. Today, in just five minutes, I finally understood everything.

I visited a residential care center for adults — a psychoneurological facility, they call it.

I went up to the second floor, where I was hit by this smell. For dinner they were having fish and potatoes. If you’re looking for the “Soviet cultural code,” search no further than the panic attack you get from this smell.

Tearing at my collar, unable to leave, I went up another floor. There I found a plastic door bolted shut. The door had an oblong little window, and through it I saw living people looking back at me, like animals in a pen. There were a dozen men, all wearing identical clothes. I couldn’t even nod in return.

Christ, just two hours earlier I’d been telling a room full of students about the concept of dignity, about human rights, about the pillars of social journalism, about talking as equals, and about the fact that any person is always a person. Now, out of sheer fear, and because of that terrible smell of fish, I started looking around the room for anyone in a lab coat, for any supervisor — for anyone at all who would protect me.

I visited a young man — a good, down-home kid who studied political science at Moscow State University. He repairs computers, and sometimes corresponds with friends in English. They’d just transferred him here. I never would have guessed it. He was weathered. He moved slowly. His voice trembled, like in one of those gruesome movies about the Gestapo. I brought him cookies, and he couldn’t even open the box himself.

And from this pit of despair, from under all his thick blankets, he says to me, “Vera, it would have been better if they’d put me in prison. I’d already be out.” He says, “I think to myself that I must have done something to anger God.”

But what did he do to anger anyone? Was it that his mother died? That his remaining relatives then dumped him here?

Twice a day, they take them out for a smoke, lined up in formation. His phone has been taken. Dinner is at six. A grown man has dinner at six o’clock. And then that’s it for the day. Is this some kind of punishment? Is this some kind of prison? What is this?

On the way out, I met up with the facility’s deputy director. We already know each other. I tell him: give the guy his phone back. He only just got here, he doesn’t know anyone, and he’s scared. He tells me the young man can always ask the head nurse to place a call. “Vera,” he tells me, “some very scary things happen when you start granting freedoms.” Hazing, for example.

I left the cookies. I bought a coffee from a machine and stepped out for a cigarette. When I got back, the young man told me uncomfortably that he can’t even go to the bathroom at this place: there are no stalls, everything’s open, and he’s embarrassed.

I’m not afraid of the handicapped or of people with mental disabilities. But I am afraid of fascism, and I’m afraid when people are locked up like livestock. I’m afraid of your fried fish. I’m afraid when there’s no edge or end to this shit.