Former Wimberley exchange student flees Russia for new chance in the US
In 2023, when thirty- something artist Igor Babkin was teaching an art class to children in Bolshoi Kamen, Siberia, he heard his students make remarks that glorified the Ukraine war. A pacifist, he told his students to view them with humanity, but his statements did not align with official propaganda.
Going home sometime later, two men attacked him, punching and kicking him brutally.
The attack left him with a concussion and a brain injury and bruising over most of his body, which were corroborated by emergency room and psychiatric reports. He’d landed on the wrong side of the Russian “think police” with his remarks. According to his wife, Yelizaveta Kalinina, known by her nickname Liza, it was the second beating he’d sustained.
The year before, while working for the magazine Kontingent, Igor was told by his bosses that he would have to draw degrading images of Ukrainians. Liza said he was told to “. . . promote hatred in the heart of Russians.” Igor refused. A month later, two men in an unmarked car asked him to come to their office after showing him their Federal Security Service credentials. The agency that succeeded the KGB, the FSB is Russia’s primary security agency, responsible for counterintelligence, border security and counterterrorism. When Igor got into the car he was driven to a wooded area, beaten and left on the road in freezing temperatures. It took him two hours to walk out of the woods and find transport home.
When Igor and Liza reported the attack to police, he was locked up and it was made clear to him that “he was an enemy of the state.” His work with the magazine vanished and no one in the city where they lived, Liza said, would give him work. Fortunately, she found work in Bolshoi Kamen. Igor followed her there and they wed. With Igor now the recipient of two attacks, Liza decided the time had come to leave Russia.
When they talked about where to go, it wasn’t a great stretch to imagine a new life in Texas. In 2014, as an exchange student in the home of publicist Sherri Cline, Liza spent the year in Wimberley attending high school.
Cline remembers her as “an excellent student and very curious.” During that year, she said, “Liza learned a lot to admire about the U.S. It doesn’t surprise me that she put it at the top of the list for places to go.”
Cline went on to say, “Liza is an incredibly dedicated and resilient person. She has shown an amount of fortitude and strength that most of us can only hope to aspire to.”
So, Liza applied to and was accepted into a master’s program at Texas State University. Her first attempt to get a visa to the U.S. failed, but she persevered. By August of 2023 she was able to enter the U.S. from Indonesia but Igor was not allowed to accompany her. However the next month, he was able to board a plane to Tijuana, Mexico, with the legal option of applying for an appointment to enter as an asylum seeker via the U.S. government’s online CBP app.
But his time in Mexico became, as one writer put it, a “harrowing” ordeal.
After landing, Igor began continuously applying for an appointment using his phone. But four months after arriving, he was abducted by Mexican authorities who stole his phone and detained him for more than 56 hours. They took him 2,000 miles across Mexico and let him go at the Guatemala border.
The incident was documented by an amparo, a writ of protection, told to Mexican attorney Marco Viaña. Igor somehow found his way back to the border. Liza wired him money via Walmart to get a simple phone to replace the one taken by Mexican authorities. Now in Reynosa and with a new phone, he began applying again and again for an appointment. Without success, he was left to endure life in a tent on the Reynosa side of the international bridge.
According to a 2022 border report by Nexstar Media journalists, somewhere between a thousand to more than two-thousand tents made up the migrant encampment at the Reynosa bridge that year. Igor, with Liza interpreting, said that drug cartel criminals controlled the area as de facto police. He feared he would be abducted, taken to the desert and killed.
Life on the bridge was far from easy. The cartels did not allow asylum seekers, like Igor, to leave the bridge for food or other necessities. Only during the last two weeks of his stay, when volunteers were no longer allowed to bring food to them, could they leave the bridge as frequently as needed. But the area they were allowed to go was limited to roughly 900 feet. On one occasion, cartel thugs saw Igor stray outside the area when he purchased a Sim card for his phone. They took a picture of him and threatened him with dire consequences if he did it again.
Since Igor could show proof of persecution, he was eligible to physically wait in a humanitarian line to be legally processed. About five people were admitted per day, but not every day. The process was excruciatingly slow but at least he had the option. He spent the time applying via the app. Eventually he was able to cross through the humanitarian line.
Once through, however, his journey was still not over. From the U.S. side of the border, he was taken to a Port Isabel detention center where he was held for yet another month.
When his release was finally announced, Liza helped get him to San Marcos. It was the summer of 2024, nearly a year since Liza had left him in Indonesia.
When I sat down with the couple to hear their story over an excellent lunch of borscht that they prepared, Igor was able to respond to my greetings in English. Beyond that, Liza took over as interpreter as the interview progressed.
While naturally introverted, Igor was polite and attentive but appeared to be a man who had been deeply traumatized. When I asked how he had weathered the events of the previous years, he admitted to struggling with bouts of depression and post traumatic stress disorder. Igor did not smile throughout the interview until Liza revealed that they were expecting a child in mid-May.
Other good news, they told me, was that they had found an immigration attorney who told them their case “was good.”
To make ends meet, Igor paints portraits of families and pets. Recently, Jeff Rasco, the mayor of Woodcreek presented his wife with a portrait of their family painted by Igor. In addition to her 20-hour a week duties as a graduate assistant at Texas State, they pet sit when the opportunity arises.
The couple has found a staunch ally in the person of Kathie Carlson and a small group of supporters. When I asked Carlson how they met she said, “I met them at an Art Crawl in September. In Junior High I took a Russian language class and thought I’d try the few words I remembered. They understood me and we began a conversation – in English.”
“What strikes me,” said Carlson, “is how different our perspectives are. Liza and Igor are happy because they are safe and free. But I see what they don’t have. I ask them what they need but they don’t think they lack for much. When I asked Liza to tell me five things that they could use, she had to think about it. Finally, she said that Igor’s phone had been stolen in Mexico and the one he was using had no storage and a broken cover. She said they could use another one in better shape, but told me not to buy a new one. It made me realize what we take for granted and how grateful I am for the way we are able to live in the U.S.”
Before Carlson and I wound up our conversation, she said, “Igor recently observed a birthday and we celebrated belatedly at the Wimberley Cafe. The staff sang birthday songs with us and Jay and Jen Bachman gave Liza and Igor gift cards to their restaurants. Actions like that and the growing number of people in our support group reflect on the generosity and kindness found in our special little town.”
Igor will be displaying his work at the Wimberley Valley Winery Art Bazaar on March 15 and at the Willow Lake Art Market 2 on March 16. His work also hangs at the Wimberley Medical Plaza as part of the Wimberley Art League’s Art in Public Places exhibition.
While the couple balk at the idea of handouts and prefer to earn what they receive, their supporters have set up a GoFundMe page to help with legal fees and upcoming expenses. The page can be accessed at https:// gofund.me/e364de5f.
