
Rina Lu🇷🇺
@rinalu_ • 45,065 subscribers
I’m here to correct the record. History matters and I’m done letting it be rewritten. Follow me for sourced, visual history of Russia/USSR, and the West’s wars.
Shorts
Videos

In 2018, Germany accidentally played the Soviet anthem instead of the Russian one before a rugby match. Watch what happened next. At first, the Russian players were puzzled. Then, without hesitation, every single one of them started singing. Word for word. From the heart. You were told the USSR was some alien regime that Russians hated. But when that anthem played, these modern Russian athletes didn’t protest or walk off. They sang, and they sang loudly. Because the Soviet Union isn’t some separate entity that Russians want to forget. It’s part of Russian history. The Russian Empire became the USSR, which was later dissolved in 1991. The political system changed, the borders changed, but the historical continuity remained.
Rina Lu🇷🇺222,516 views • 20 hours ago

Putin says he sometimes watches Western television just to understand what European audiences are being shown. And what he sees is “mass deception.” He gives a recent example. After an attack on Starobelsk that killed civilians, including children, Russia struck targets in the Kiev region in response. According to Putin, Western channels spent the entire day showing the Russian strikes: the destruction, the damage, the “Russian aggressor.” But not a word about what happened in Starobelsk before that. Not a word about the dead children. Then the narrative moves to Ukrainian drones, their military successes and how much those weapons cost. The message to European viewers follows naturally: pay more. Putin’s point is simple, and I completely agree with him: if you show the response while erasing what preceded it, you are manufacturing the story your audience is allowed to see.
Rina Lu🇷🇺812,326 views • 7 days ago

Stalin ruled the USSR for nearly three decades and died with almost nothing to his name. No offshore accounts, luxury estates or wealth passed to relatives. He showed no interest in luxury or acquiring things for himself. Even the ornate marshal's uniform in which he was eventually buried was something he reportedly disliked wearing. Compare that to Western politicians who enter office on a modest salary and leave as multimillionaires.
Rina Lu🇷🇺402,330 views • 5 days ago

Putin arrived 14 minutes late to meet the Queen in 2003. When it was time to leave, Elizabeth II kept him waiting the exact same amount of time. That wordless exchange taught more about real power than any speech ever could. By 2003, Vladimir Putin was already known for not adjusting himself to symbolic hierarchies. His state visit to Buckingham Palace became a quiet example of that. Although the Queen met the Russian president more than once, this was the only full state reception, and it was remembered because Putin arrived twelve to fourteen minutes late. The official explanation mentioned traffic in central London, even though routes for visits of that level are normally cleared. The explanation was accepted without comment, and when it was time for the farewell, Elizabeth II appeared with exactly the same delay, turning the episode into a wordless exchange between equals.
Rina Lu🇷🇺9,014,151 views • 7 months ago

The Vatican's foreign minister just arrived in Moscow. At the exact same time as the CIA director. He met Lavrov. The CIA guy met Naryshkin. If you think that's a coincidence, you haven't been paying attention to how the Vatican actually operates. Let me remind you: the Vatican backs Ukraine and every crime committed against not only Russian civilians but the Orthodox Church itself. Ukraine kills monks and priests. The Vatican stays silent. Vatican is a geopolitical power that pulls strings across continents. The fact that mainstream analysts never discuss the Vatican's influence only proves how powerful they really are.
Rina Lu🇷🇺194,169 views • 9 days ago

September 1, 1939. Germany invades Poland. Everyone knows this date. What nobody asks is where Hitler got the money. The Weimar Republic was completely bankrupt. Hyperinflation so bad that people burned banknotes for heat because it was cheaper than buying wood. And then somehow, in less than a decade, that same broken country built the most powerful military machine in European history. That kind of money doesn't appear out of nowhere. And the people who provided it didn't do it out of ideology. They did it because it was profitable. 🧵 To understand how broke Germany actually was: in 1933, when Hitler came to power, unemployment was at 30%. Banks were failing. The government couldn't pay its own bills. The Nazi party itself was nearly bankrupt. And yet six years later Germany had full employment, the most modern air force in the world, and an army that would overrun France in six weeks. That turnaround required massive outside investment. The question mainstream history tends to skip is not just who invested, but how much they made. #1
Rina Lu🇷🇺41,747 views • 2 days ago

Yesterday marked 22 years since Beslan - the deadliest terrorist attack in modern Russian history, which claimed 334 lives, including 186 children. Against that anniversary, Zelensky chose to threaten civilian aviation. Putin’s response is short and to the point: “We do not negotiate with terrorists.” Indeed. We simply eliminate them wherever we find them.
Rina Lu🇷🇺28,140 views • 1 day ago

They taught you about the Holocaust. But they never told you that Italy and Francoist Spain also participated in the Nazi Germany campaign that starved Soviet civilians at Leningrad. For 872 days, Nazi Germany and Finland besieged Leningrad, with forces from Italy and Spain also taking part in the wider campaign which many historians now classify as an act of genocide. Their plan was to starve 2.5 million people to death rather than capture the city.
Rina Lu🇷🇺70,500 views • 5 days ago

The ‘Tutberidze skeletons’ line is just another propaganda slogan. The girls are thin because they are elite athletes and train on a constant basis, and because glyphosate is strictly regulated in Russia and GMOs are banned. The real question is why an American athlete is not slim. What exactly are you eating over there? The smear campaign against Tutberidze exists only because her girls keep winning gold medals, making history, and getting into the Guinness World Records. You cannot beat them fairly. They tried changing the rules, but that did not work. So they went to extreme lengths: banning Russian athletes, limiting participation to just one skater with no proper ranking opportunities, creating extremely stressful conditions, not allowing a coach to fully support them at competitions, and so on. That’s the stage we are at. P.S.: Kamila Valieva was the first woman to land a quadruple jump at the Olympic Games 👇
Rina Lu🇷🇺2,603,440 views • 6 months ago

When Russia plays by the rules too well, they just change the rules. At the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, Zagitova built her free skate in a way that squeezed every possible point out of the rules. All her jumps were placed in the second half, where they earned bonus points. It was a very smart and perfectly executed move. After that season, the International Skating Union limited how many jumps could get the second-half bonus. People started calling it the Zagitova Rule.
Rina Lu🇷🇺2,567,759 views • 6 months ago

You've been told the conflict in Palestine is ancient, rooted in centuries of religious hatred between Arabs and Jews. This video shows an Arab man who grew up in Jerusalem, describing something completely different. He lived alongside Jews and Christian Arabs. They studied in the same schools. His family was friends with Jewish families. They coexisted peacefully. For 13 centuries, Jews found refuge in Islamic states when Europe was persecuting them. Palestine welcomed them. The Ottoman Empire protected them. The conflict began with the arrival of international Zionism. Not before. A political movement created the divide. The hatred you see today was manufactured, not inherited. This video is from a Soviet documentary from 1982.
Rina Lu🇷🇺38,520 views • 3 days ago

You've been told Russian cities outside Moscow and St. Petersburg are gray, crumbling, stuck in Soviet decay. Ivanovo, 300 km (186 miles) by road from Moscow. A typical Russian city you've probably never heard of. Here's two minutes of driving through Ivanovo. Clean streets and normal life. Certainly nothing dramatic. Just reality your media conveniently forgets to show you.
Rina Lu🇷🇺26,081 views • 2 days ago

Russia spent the 1990s watching foreigners - Americans and Europeans - extract its wealth on their own terms - until Putin. Under Yeltsin, Russia’s vast natural resources on Sakhalin were handed to foreign investors - literally, for pennies on the dollar. Production-sharing agreements gave foreign companies such as the American ExxonMobil or British Shell extraordinarily favorable terms: Russia received as little as 10 cents from every dollar of oil profits while investors enjoyed sweeping tax exemptions - even as ordinary people on the island froze in the cold. Putin later called these deals “a colonial practice that had absolutely nothing to do with Russia’s interests,” and said the officials who signed them in the 1990s should have been jailed. Immediately after taking power in 2000, Putin began dismantling the system. By 2004, 260 of 262 agreements had been terminated. The remaining projects were gradually returned to Russian control - Sakhalin-2 in 2006 and Sakhalin-1 in 2022. Yet Western narratives still insist Yeltsin was the decolonizer. Watch the video. This is what real decolonization looks like.
Rina Lu🇷🇺120,045 views • 13 days ago

All right, here is Lukashenko tearing into Zelensky, which is hardly surprising. But the more interesting part is the comparison he makes. Listen carefully to how the president of Belarus talks about Gorbachev. Lukashenko compares Zelensky to a man who was celebrated as a hero in the West while the Soviet Union was falling apart. Everyone is going to focus on what he says about Zelensky. I would pay much more attention to what this tells you about how Lukashenko views Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet Union. And then ask yourself a simple question. If Soviet Russia and communism were really as universally hated and disastrous as you are constantly told, why, more than thirty years later, does the president of another former Soviet republic still speak about the man associated with its collapse with such contempt? Maybe the Soviet past was never quite as black and white as the Western fairy tale made it. What do you think?
Rina Lu🇷🇺27,974 views • 3 days ago

Zelensky announced Ukraine would grant citizenship to "all those suffering under authoritarian and corrupt regimes," clearly targeting Russia. Putin's response was pure mockery. "Really? Did he actually say that? Well, very good. That means we'll probably come to an agreement." "If they start granting citizenship to Russians in Ukraine, and we grant it to Ukrainians in Russia, we'll reach a common denominator and the desired result pretty quickly. We'll have common citizenship," Putin said, adding a phrase in Ukrainian, thereby emphasizing the historical connection between the two peoples.
Rina Lu🇷🇺144,638 views • 18 days ago

Lavrov had enough of Americans in his meeting with Rubio😅 He says to the press: speak louder. Not because he doesn't hear them but because they obnoxiously scream over each other like children fighting for attention. Meanwhile, Russian journalists wait their turn, ask their questions clearly, and don't need to be told how to behave. That's the difference between a press corps trained to inform and one trained to perform.
Rina Lu🇷🇺326,494 views • 1 month ago

At first Gorbachev sneered at Putin as little more than an assistant to the mayor of St. Petersburg. He didn’t believe Putin could fix the mess he and Yeltsin had created. History proved Gorbachev wrong. Turns out you don’t have to be part of the nomenklatura to unite the people. You need to know, love and respect your country - the rest will follow.
Rina Lu🇷🇺250,876 views • 1 month ago