History | Russia

Video 1 Transcript

So Russia was way too much to fit into 60 seconds, but basically they had kings and everything until the Romanovs were killed in the early 1900s when the Bolsheviks took over. Then they entered into a time of communism and everything, which most people know. This was a really dark time for Russia, and if people were smiling on the streets, then their neighbors would turn them in, which is also kind of why Russians don't smile when they're on the streets. You walk into a bus and everyone has just like this, right? So it like carried over to today. Then Gorbachev and Yeltsin, Boris Yeltsin, oh my gosh, Boris Yeltsin, the first president of Russia, broke up the USSR in the 90s, and now it's a somewhat democracy. It's really socialist, and Putin's kind of moving it back towards communism. The youth don't really like it, but the adults are okay with it because they kind of miss communism, so.

Video 2 Transcript

Some unique history is the city of Volgograd, which actually used to be named Stalingrad, and that is where the Russians were able to halt the Nazis in World War II. So if you ever get to that area, that is where the old Stalingrad used to be, and they have the big giant statue of Marmaya Korkan, and that is a giant statue of a woman holding up a sword, kind of yelling a fierce battle cry, it seemed like. Google it, look at it, it's really cool. But that's a little cool history about Volgograd.