Kolya was a spineless idiot and an alcoholic

The night when the drunk mayor showed up at his home, he should have shot and killed the mayor, as well as his knucklehead bodyguards. In the end, Kolya would have gotten the same 10 years in prison as he got for allegedly killing his wife, but he also could have gotten off pretty lightly with a minimal punishment if the mayor was dead, full of alcohol, armed, and on private property, with no witnesses.

In fact, Kolya was surprisingly spineless the whole movie considering that the author did portray Kolya as a renegade who will challenge the authority at any cost and against all the odds. He was also incredibly stupid. His wife viewed the eviction as some kind of a positive omen in order to escape the grim life in the cold, frozen, boring, and poor Russian north. Kolya was advised of various possibilities to move to Moscow, and establish his life there. He refused. Why? Because he apparently inherited his house from an aristocrat ancestor. But if he felt that he had the blood of an aristocrat, why was he so spineless? Did he do anything in the movie other than drinking non-stop or fixing the traffic cop's car for free, like he was this cop's bitch?

Clearly, there is a higher meaning here. Kolya is a metaphor for the Russian people, who lived the life of oppressed slaves for centuries under the Russian Czars, then under blood-thirsty Stalinist regime, and now under Putin's officialdom that's portrayed so well in this film.