He dug them up in graveyards, dressed the mummified bodies up and displayed them in his flat

Russian police have arrested a man described by local media as the "cemetery collector" for digging up 29 corpses and dressing the remains in female clothing to display around his flat.

Grainy police video images of the man's cramped flat showed what look like several life-sized female dolls without faces, some with platinum blond wigs.

"During a search of his flat and garage, 29 self-made, life-size 'dolls' dressed in the clothes of buried people were found," a spokesman for police in Nizhny Novgorod, 400km east of Moscow, said Tuesday.

"It was ascertained that he used mummified human bodies from graves to make them (the dolls)."

Police described the man, who was arrested following the desecration of graves in the area, as a local historian and an expert in the study of place names.

Media cited friends as saying they had never seen the dolls and that he was a learned, if eccentric, man.