Julia Ioffe is contributing writer at Politico Magazine.

She was just off a flight from London, just in time for the last night of the Democratic convention and a strategy meeting for Democratic Party bundlers. She snapchatted a video of campaign manager John Podesta singing “Happy Birthday” to longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin among the artwork hanging on the clean, well-lighted walls of the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts. It was Maria Baibakova’s sweet spot: at 30 years old, she amassed a long track record in both art and politics. With an art history degree from Barnard and a business degree from Harvard, she has been running an art consultancy out of London, and for the past four years, she has been a big player in Democratic Party politics, bundling for the Obama and Clinton campaigns, hosting fundraisers and sitting on various campaign policy committees. She met her husband at a dinner in Boston at which she tried to convert him to the Democratic cause and the Obama campaign.

She also happens to be Russian.


At the end of a bizarre week in which Democrats accused the Russian government of meddling in the American elections and putting its thumb on the scales for Donald Trump, Baibakova is a bit of a counterpoint, one of several prominent Russian-Americans who are starting to play a larger role in American politics. Her father is a notable Russian industrialist and real estate developer who lives in a hypermodern mansion in Moscow’s equivalent of Beverly Hills, and Baibakova shuttles between her homes in Moscow, London and New York.

“I feel myself to be very American,” Baibakova told me, sipping a glass of sauvignon blanc at the bar of a swanky Philadelphia hotel that housed foreign delegations and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright for the convention. “I moved to America when I was 10, I grew up with liberal progressive values. I am a feminist to the core. I share all those values with Hillary. I went to public school until 11 grade. I appreciated the opportunities this country gave me.”

Baibakova moved to the States in 1996 when U.S.-Russian relations were diametrically different. It was five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, and Russia was in a state of turbulent but hopeful transition to democracy and capitalism. Hopes on both sides ran high that the two countries could establish a new, friendlier relationship. American policy wonks even helped the Russians draft their constitution.

But with Vladimir Putin’s ascent to the presidency in 2000, the country steadily pulled back from its democratic dream. He also increasingly stoked the idea that Russia had been humiliated by the West and needed to flex its muscle on the world stage to recover its geopolitical status and regain the fearful respect of America. Foreign policy observers began to talk increasingly of a new Cold War. At home in Russia, elections became fraudulent, the press muzzled, business dominated by the Russian security services, and the patriotic, anti-Western, anti-liberal jingoism deafeningly loud. For some Russians—even those like Baibakova, whose families became fabulously wealthy in the post-Soviet era—this version of Russia is as horrifying as Donald Trump’s version of America is to many people here at the Democratic National Convention.

Baibakova is facing both nightmares, one real, one preventable. But the confluence of the two—in the rumors swirling around the Democratic National Committee hack and Trump’s Russia connection—elicits a very Russian reaction: laughter at the absurdity of it all. And though she’s not totally convinced that Russian security agencies hacked and leaked the DNC emails—Baibakova says she’d like to see some more solid evidence—“but is it possible? Of course it is.” And she laughs again.

Baibakova became an American citizen but has not given up her Russian passport, and though she feels at home in both countries, she can participate in the political life of only one of them. “Russia is now anti-gay, anti-feminist,” she explains. “There is growing polarization in Russia around what they call ‘traditional values.’ I don’t connect with those values. There isn't an avenue for someone like me to participate in Russian politics."

And so Baibakova plunged into American political life with great energy. During the 2012 campaign, she was on the Obama campaign’s finance committee and hosted an event called Art for Obama, in which artists donated art that was auctioned off to raise money for the president’s reelection campaign. She was a prominent guest at his 2012 inauguration. She has remained active even after moving to London with her French-American husband. Baibakova is planning a fundraiser for American ex-pats in September—“I don’t know any Americans living abroad who are for Trump”—and hosted an October event with Abedin in Paris during Fashion Week.

At that event, Dasha Zhukova, 35, the partner of Roman Abramovich, a true Russian oligarch who is close to Vladimir Putin and is one of the richest men in Russia, wrote a check to the Clinton campaign for $2,700, the individual limit. Like Baibakova, Zhukova also immigrated to the U.S. at a young age and is a naturalized American citizen. Zhukova, who grew up in California, also donated the maximum—$33,400—to the DNC at a December event with Sting.

If Zhukova and Baibakova are Russians putting their thumbs on the scale for the Democrats, other prominent Russians are less ideological. The Russian-born American businessman and philanthropist Leonard Blavatnik and his American wife, Emily, for example, have also been prolific donors, but it is unclear whom they are rooting for, donating to the DNC, the RNC, to the campaigns of Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham and John Kasich, as well as Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton. Blavatnik, who was born in the Soviet Union and made his money in Russia, is doing a perfectly American thing: placing bets on every possible outcome.

For Baibakova, this is natural. She grew up in America, America formed her world view as much as Russia did, except that, under Putin, Russia is becoming increasingly warped and unrecognizable. In her 20s, she tried to bring contemporary art to Moscow at a time when no one was bothering to do it, leaving Russians with the impression that Picasso is as contemporary as it gets. But, even with her father’s wealth and connections, she was muscled out of several spaces by shady men in dark suits, and she eventually abandoned trying to work in art and philanthropy in Russia. It is that experience that drives her American patriotism, and her belief that she is helping to keep America great even as the country of her birth becomes increasingly unsavory politically. “Progressive values inform my whole life, my work with art, my philanthropic work,” she says. “Feminism is part of the story. Fairness, competitiveness, opportunity are part of the story—all these things that are missing from Russian life.”

She adds, laughing, “I’m not a total foreign agent.”