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 café, 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. 'Did you ever hear of Russian Roulette?' When I said I had not, he told me all about it. The term Russian roulette was possibly first used in a 1937 short story of the same name by Georges Surdez, published in the January 30, 1937, edition of Collier's magazine: The weapon fails to fire, but when Vulič cocks the pistol again and aims it at a service cap hanging over the window, a shot rings out and smoke fills the room. He then asks Grigory to throw a playing card in the air, and when the card lands, he pulls the trigger. 'Gentlemen! Who will pay 20 gold pieces for me?', Vulič asks, putting the muzzle of the pistol to his forehead. Nobody knows if the pistol is loaded or not. A lieutenant of the dragoons of the Tsar, Vulič, a man of Serbian origins with a passion for gambling, accepts the challenge and randomly takes one of a number of pistols of various calibres from its nail, cocks it and pours gunpowder onto the pan. In the story, which is set in a Cossack village, the protagonist, Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin, claims that there is no predestination and proposes a bet in order to prove it, laying about twenty gold pieces onto a table. If the loaded chamber aligns with the barrel, the weapon will fire, killing or severely injuring the player.Īccording to Andrew Clarke, the first trace of Russian roulette can be found in the short story 'The Fatalist', which was written in 1840 and was part of the collection A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, a Russian poet and writer. Russian roulette ( Russian: Русская рулетка, romanized: Russkaya ruletka) is a potentially lethal game of chance in which a player places a single round in a revolver, spins the cylinder, places the muzzle against the head or body (of the opponent or themselves), and pulls the trigger. Cylinder is in the open (non-firing) position. For other uses, see Russian Roulette (disambiguation).Ĭharacters in the 1978 film The Deer Hunter engaging in a game of Russian roulette A revolver with a single round loaded in the cylinder. For the similarly-named 1965 cartoon, see Rushing Roulette.

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