What does Rusev Machka mean?
Rusev is a multi-time United States Champion. He's had an interesting journey in WWE, initially being portrayed as an Anti-American heel for years before garnering mass popularity on SmackDown Live and eventually turning babyface at one point.
Through all of that, he's had alliances with Lana (a constant), Jinder Mahal and even Aiden English, the latter of whom helped elevate his popularity.
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However, his NXT days were quite different. He even teamed up with, Scott Dawson, who is one-half of the current NXT Tag Team Champions, The Revival, in a tag team known as “The Fighting Legionnaires”, with Sylvester Lefort as the manager. However, the team was short-lived.
He, later on, got Lana as his manager, whom he termed as his “social ambassador”. On the main roster, he started his Anti-American gimmick that he portrayed for a few years. He was then billed from Russia and held an undefeated streak for over a year until he was defeated by John Cena at Wrestlemania 31.
It must be noted that his gimmick of being a Russian hero, gained him legitimate heat in Bulgaria and created some controversy. However, after Wrestlemania 31, he silently changed from being a Russian to Bulgarian, and now he is called The Bulgarian Brute.
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His theme song is quite famous, and the introduction of the theme song features him saying “Rusev udrya Rusev machka!”. What does this mean?
"Rusev udrya, Rusev machka!" is Bulgarian for: "Rusev hit Rusev crush!”
Udrya – Hit
Machka – Crush
This is why you can hear Rusev saying “RUSEV! CRUSH!” while making the hand gestures often. Lana herself often makes the gesture with one hand. It looks like this
Outside Kayfabe, Rusev has a reputation for being one of the funniest and most fun-loving guys to be around. Here you can see Rusev playing UFC 2 with Jey Uso in Austin Creed’s(Xavier Woods) YouTube Channel UpUpDownDown:
Perhaps, the most you can see Rusev out of character is on UpUpDownDown, where he enjoys playing games with other WWE wrestlers. However, his wife Lana is also a part of the main cast of Total Divas, not only will we see Lana, (real name CJ Perry) out of character, speaking in an American accent, we will also likely see a new side of Rusev as well.
Many fans criticized WWE's booking of Rusev from late 2017 to mid-2018. At this point, despite being a heel, he achieved massive popularity thanks to his "Rusev Day" gimmick. He eventually turned babyface. This undoubtedly would have made Rusev happy, as he's stated before in interviews that he wants to be the first foreigner in WWE to be portrayed as a good guy and not a stereotypical foreign heel like WWE has been guilty of doing for decades.
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