It is the sort of request that has politicians queuing up for a photo opportunity. But Russian bureaucrats had other ideas when schoolgirl Anastasia Ivliyeva wrote to President Medvedev asking him for a pet guinea pig.

Anastasia, 13, explained in an e-mail to the President’s official Kremlin website that her parents had given her a male guinea pig and that she hoped Mr Medvedev would send a girlfriend to keep him company.

After weeks without a reply the teenager was suddenly summoned to see her headmistress at her village school in Kalitvensky near Rostov, southern Russia, and given a dressing-down for wasting the President’s time.

In a scene worthy of an Anton Chekhov play, Russian newspapers reported that Anastasia was then ordered to apologise to a local government inspector for the trouble that she had caused and to write a letter publicly withdrawing her request.

The headmistress, Galina Boldireva, went further. She called the girl’s father, poured scorn on her academic abilities and criticised him for allowing his daughter to disturb the President with such a trivial matter.

“She was insulting my husband, saying that we were not paying enough attention to what she was doing in her free time at home and that we could afford to buy a guinea pig,” Anastasia’s mother Lyudmila said.

The schoolgirl became a guinea pig for people power, however, when her indignant parents wrote again to the Kremlin to complain about her treatment by local officials. The presidential response was swift and decisive.

Anastasia was summoned to see the head again, but this time was met by a red-faced local education director holding two guinea pigs in a cage. The official handed over a letter acknowledging Anastasia’s request to the President and explaining that he had personally presented the gift to her.

The presidential website encourages Russians to write to Mr Medvedev, saying that all letters are dealt with by a special department in his office. Anastasia was apparently inspired to test the system after watching Dasha Varfolomeyeva, a girl from Yakutia, ask Vladimir Putin for a new dress during his televised phone-in with Russians in December. Mr Putin, the Prime Minister invited her to travel from Russia’s Far East with her grandmother to celebrate New Year in Moscow.

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