Anna arrived in Paris with a packet of buckwheat and a determination to get a modelling job.
Her dream is to walk the catwalk for her favourite brand, Yves Saint Laurent.
She remembers well the day she was discovered by an agency. “A scout from Nizhny Novgorod wrote to me on a Russian social media network called Vkontakte,” she tells me inside a Parisian brasserie over a cup of coffee and a Caesar salad.
“She said she liked my pictures and that I could be a model. She invited me and my mum for an interview.”
After an audition Anna was soon sent to South Korea on her first modelling assignment.
She was just 14.
“My parents were worried but the agency’s director and my personal agent there Ravida talked to them,” remembers Anna.
“They said it was safe and that the agency bookers take care of their girls. The youngest was just 12.”
Anna’s family is what can be described as middle-class. When I meet her, she is in her final year at a local school in Nizhny Novgorod - a city about 250 miles (402km) east of Moscow.
She admits that her modelling jobs – which can last for two months – can, at times, put her under pressure.
“The teachers are always pressuring me saying that I am missing a lot and I won’t pass my exams,” she says.
“Many of them say: ‘Why are you are taking so much time off?’
They think I am travelling on holiday but they can’t imagine what it takes to do 10 castings a day. At night all you can do is just collapse on your bed.”
For many Russian teenagers, the ideal scenario would be to get a free place at one of the local universities. But the number of government-financed places is limited, so most of the students will have to pay for their education.
An academic year costs around $900 (approximately £700). With an average monthly income of $500 (£400), combined with the lack of a student loan scheme, many families have to start saving from the time their children start school.
But for ambitious teenagers like Anna, who is already well-travelled, Nizhny can feel small.
Inspired by social media and Instagram in particular, young people in Nizhny are increasingly interested in creative jobs and some of them told me that the Soviet teaching style at local universities is too old-fashioned for them.
Moscow, just four hours away by train, has far better universities but the competition for places is extremely tough.
Anna says she is likely to enrol at the local university but dreams of studying design at Parsons School of Design in New York in the future.
Thanks to her modelling career, she believes this dream has more chance of becoming reality.
She proudly says she can afford to pay for her shopping and food (and occasionally send her parents flowers while she is abroad).
