The Tsar of Back in My Day

Lately, he’d been thinking about his ex-father-in-law. Not the ex-wife - calm down. That road had enough potholes already. No, this was about Kolya.

They had never been especially close. Between the language barrier, the cultural divide, and the lingering fog of the recently ended Cold War, “warm relationship” was never really on the menu. Still, Kolya had made an impression. Men like that tended to.

He was somewhere in his mid-to-late sixties when they met. Picture the farmer from American Gothic if he’d been drafted by the Soviet Union, fed boiled cabbage, and taught to glare professionally. Bald as a cannonball, which somehow made his head seem even larger. Thick square plastic eyeglasses magnified his eyes until they looked like a permanent accusation. He dressed sharply, but in a way that suggested the tailor’s motto had been adequate for the State.

Then there were his teeth.

No expert on the subject, he could only assume cosmetic dentistry had been dismissed by the Soviets as bourgeois vanity. Kolya’s mouth appeared to contain a prototype assembled from enamel, wire, screws, and whatever was left over from a bridge repair project. George Washington would have taken one look and thanked his own dentist. It was said Novocain had been scarce. If true, Kolya’s jaw had known more hardship than most nations.

What brought Kolya back to mind was a recent binge of videos about Lake Baikal. Decades ago, he’d dreamed of riding the Trans-Siberian Railway and seeing the lake for himself. At twenty-something, the idea sounded glorious: a week trapped on a train with strangers, questionable plumbing, heroic amounts of alcohol, and enough oddballs to populate a Tolstoy novel.

There would have been language problems, sure. But effort mattered. Besides, after enough vodka, most people become conversational philosophers.

Kolya had spent his childhood in Siberia, and he was the undisputed emperor of the phrase “Back in my day.” Everything was harder then. Everything was colder. Everything was uphill, both ways, with wolves, ice, and snow.

In stern, careful English, delivered inches from your face because Soviet notions of personal space differed wildly from American ones, Kolya explained that his family had lived in a hole in the ground. Not “like a hole in the ground.” Not “it felt like.”

A literal hole.

In the ground.

In Siberia.

As a child, he apparently emerged each morning from this earth cavity into temperatures that, by his account, hovered somewhere near a hundred below. Historians and meteorologists may dispute this. Kolya did not.

And then came the wildlife.

Bears. Wolves. Constant attacks, if you believed him. One got the sense that Kolya’s youth had consisted mainly of sprinting from the family hole to repel incoming predators with farm tools and Soviet resolve. If a tiger had wandered through, no one would have been surprised.

He never mentioned seals from Lake Baikal behaving inappropriately, but memory is imperfect and imagination opportunistic.

To hear Kolya tell it, childhood meant freezing in a hole while fighting bears and wolves, uphill - both ways, through ice and snow. Also, everything cost one kopeck.

And he was grateful.

Those hardships, he insisted, made him strong. They gave him discipline. They propelled him from Siberia to Leningrad, where he reinvented himself. He served in the military. Became a doctor. Joined the Party. Married. Raised a family. Eventually he became father-in-law to an American whose life choices baffled him on a spiritual level.

The feeling, to be fair, was mutual.

Yet after the divorce, Kolya and his wife reportedly spent two years urging their daughter to reconcile and remarry him - which was touching, in its own stern Soviet way.

Kolya had always brought with him a supply of rotgut vodka that had somehow crossed oceans, borders, and common sense. It arrived in vaguely marked bottles and smelled faintly of fuel. One sip suggested it may have powered early Soviet tractors, submarines, or portions of the space program.

After two glasses, Kolya’s English did not improve, but his confidence in speaking it did. His stories got colder, and the wolves grew larger.

He remained reticent to discuss the Baikal seals.

As different as their worlds had been, the old man liked him.

Uphill, both ways.

And everyone was grateful.

To this day, he still can’t drink vodka.

copyright notice © 2026 Michael C. Metzger