Games - Russian roulette

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	Games - Russian roulette

Russian roulette is the practice of placing one round in a revolver, spinning the cylinder and closing it into the firearm without looking, aiming the revolver at one's own head in a suicidal fashion, and pulling the trigger. The number of rounds placed in the revolver can vary. As a gambling game, toy guns are often used to simulate the practice. The number of deaths caused by this practice is unknown.

History

Legends abound regarding the invention of Russian roulette. Most of these, predictably, take place in Russia, or occur among Russian soldiers.

In one legend, 19th century Russian prisoners were forced to play the game while the prison guards bet on the outcome. In another version, desperate and suicidal officers in the Russian army played the game to impress each other.

The earliest known use of the term is from "Russian Roulette", a short story by Georges Surdez in the January 30, 1937, issue of Collier's Magazine. A Russian sergeant in the French Foreign Legion asks the narrator,

:"'Feldheim . . . did you ever hear of Russian Roulette?' When I said I had not, he told me all about it. When he was with the Russian army in Rumania, around 1917, and things were cracking up, so that their officers felt that they were not only losing prestige, money, family, and country, but were being also dishonored before their colleagues of the Allied armies, some officer would suddenly pull out his revolver, anywhere, at the table, in a cafe, at a gathering of friends, remove a cartridge from the cylinder, spin the cylinder, snap it back in place, put it to his head, and pull the trigger. There were five chances to one that the hammer would set off a live cartridge and blow his brains all over the place. Sometimes it happened, sometimes not."

Whether Tsarist officers actually played Russian roulette is unclear. In a text on the Tsarist officer corps, John Bushnell, a Russian history expert at Northwestern University, cited two near-contemporary memoirs by Russian army veterans, The Duel (1905) by Aleksandr Kuprin and From Double Eagle to Red Flag (1921) by Petr Krasnov. Both books tell of officers' suicidal and outrageous behaviour, but Russian roulette is not mentioned in either text. If the game did originate in real life behavior and not fiction it is unlikely that it started with the Russian military. The standard sidearm issued to Russian officers from 1895 to 1930 was the Nagant M1895 revolver. The design of the Nagant makes it impossible to spin the cylinder and randomize the position of the cartridge, making the gun unsuitable for the game.

The only reference to anything like Russian roulette in Russian literature is in a book entitled A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov (1840, translated by Vladimir Nabokov in 1958), where a similar act is performed by a Serbian soldier: the dare however is not named as "Russian roulette". Russian officers did play a game called "cuckoo" with a Nagant revolver, whereby one officer would stand on a table or a chair in a dark room. Others would hide and yell "cuckoo" and the man with the gun would fire at the sound.

In the 1978 movie The Deer Hunter, the game is also depicted as being played in Vietnam. According to one website which tries to provide evidence on the matter, Valerie Douglas, whose father's cousin and father were in the Vietnam War, claims that Russian roulette occurred both for gambling and murder. Several teen deaths following the movie's release caused police and the media to blame the film's depiction of Russian roulette, saying that it inspired the youths. There is also an interesting Russian roulette scene in the Japanese film Sonatine, directed by Takeshi Kitano.

A semi-automatic pistol, unlike a revolver, will automatically load and fire a round if it has any rounds remaining. There has been at least one Darwin Award resulting from an attempt to play Russian roulette with such a pistol. This variation is sometimes referred to as "Polish roulette," -- a bigoted play on the stereotype of Polish people being of low intelligence -- though its actual origins are disputed.

Another variation that is known is the practice of having all chambers of a revolver filled but one and is sometimes referred to as Belgian roulette.

"Russian Poker" is a variation of Russian Roulette - the difference being that in Russian Poker, one's opponent places the gun up to the other person and pulls the trigger. This game is played at the climax of the movie Intacto.

Notable Russian roulette incidents

Reality

On December 24, 1954 the American blues musician Johnny Ace shot himself to death in Texas playing Russian roulette in a dressing room before a concert.

John Hinckley, Jr. was known to play Russian Roulette, alone, on two occasions (although neither time he pulled the trigger was the bullet in the firing chamber). Hinckley also took a picture of himself in 1980 pointing a gun at his temple.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Russian roulette ]

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