It’s also possible it’s a hopelessly dated and archaic idiom that no modern speaker would recognize but was still fairly popular when that language course was first written, or something. It only takes a decade or two for a phrase to disappear from common usage sometimes.
Or maybe (since it references “czarist times” the phrase was already crazy dated and old but the Russian-speaking Englishman who wrote the course saw the phrase somewhere, thought it was funny, and so put it in. Wouldn’t put that past this world of ours either.