I can’t say why people are using czar specifically but people have been called the “lord of X” or “Y king” practically forever without being literal kings or lords. It’s just an emphatic way to say they’re seen as powerful within a given space, it’s not a claim that they’re literally a Russian ruler.

There’s a detailed wiki article about it here.

TLDR: it’s specific to the US and UK, has been in use for over a century, and is largely metaphorical.

And offcourse there is a wikipedia about it, tought it was something contemporary. Thanks!

It’s orientalism. “Scary far-east Judeo-Bolshevik Asiatic hordes are coming for our women and our toothbrushes!” nonsense that occasionally gets embraced “ironically” by people playing into cartoon villainy. It’s especially gained popularity among liberals in the Democratic party as part of the whole Russiagate explanation for why they keep losing elections.

The word tsar/czar originally derives from Julius Caesar, just like the German “kaiser”.

But in US terms, it was popularized by FDR during WWII.

In 1942, The Washington Post reported on the “executive orders creating new czars to control various aspects of our wartime economy.”[11] Positions were created for a transportation czar, a manpower czar, a production czar, a shipping czar, and a synthetic rubber czar, all to solve difficult problems in coordinating the resources necessary to fight World War II wikipedia

Anecdotally whenever the US government appoints one I’m convinced that that program will fail… I was young when the Drug Czar was appointed and pretty much all since them have been shit

I think usually it refers to someone who is given broad powers over a certain area of interest without necessarily sticking to a pre-defined title.

During event organization we would sometimes refer to the people who enforce parking rules as “parking czars”.

And there’s NYC’s “Rat Czar” who is responsible for tackling the city’s rat problem