RAW drafts United States champion Rusev along with Lana

Here is all you need to know about Rusev and Lana, who are now officially members of the RAW roster thanks to Tuesday’s WWE brand split draft.

Back in the older days of professional wrestling when the line between good guys and bad guys was so finely established, it was easy to make fans hate a wrestler. Promoters would make wrestlers foreign, creating the fear that they were out to get the American fans. While this idea does seem archaic and racist to a certain degree, it nevertheless worked.

Fast forward to today, and that implementation is still going on, albeit in a facetious manner. Rusev is the manifestation of wrestling’s old tricks and its new self awareness. He does everything a throwback foreign bad guy would do -- mock Americans and inflict unforgiving violence on his opponents -- but at times he does it so overtly that it implies even he is in on the premise. And the way he acts in the ring strikes fear and joy, knowing that he is intentionally going over the top.

Take for example his last feud with Titus O’Neil. O’Neil, temporarily dubbed an All-American competitor, lost to Rusev for the Bulgarian’s United States championship. He then proceeded to beat the snot out of O’Neil after the match and mock O’Neil’s children, who were sitting ringside, then even took it to Twitter.

Well, not really, but Rusev’s beginnings on the main roster pertained mostly to Russia instead of Bulgaria. His manager Lana is Russian, which created the opportunity for WWE to take that throwback route, channeling Rocky IV’s Ivan Drago and Ludmilla.

From there, he was allegedly named hero of the Russian Federation from Vladimir Putin himself. He then dedicated all his success to Putin, forcing WWE to display a giant picture of the Russian leader and a Russian flag over the ring, all of it making fans boo relentlessly with ease.

The two worked a story line where they were breaking up, acknowledging that the pair was really a couple in real life. They included Summer Rae and Dolph Ziggler in a mess of a love square up until the point that Rusev popped the question outside of the squared circle. At that point the jig had been up, the story line was dropped and the two became a power-hungry Eastern European couple on screen once again.