This article first appeared in the Jan/Feb 2015 issue of World Gaming magazine.
So far in this series we have described several real-life examples of people literally gambling with their lives, but while we’re on the subject it would be remiss of us to overlook the most famous life-gamble of all – Russian roulette!
As everyone knows from seeing the movie Deer Hunter, where Robert DeNiro takes on Christopher Walken while their characters are prisoners of war in a North Vietnamese army camp, Russian roulette is played by inserting a bullet in one of the six chambers of a revolver and leaving the other five empty. You then randomly spin the cylinder, put the revolver to your temple, and pull the trigger.
The chance is 1 in 6 that the bullet is in the firing position and you become little more than a memory. Should you instead hear a “click” sound, you hand the gun to your opponent who repeats the process. You keep taking turns like this until only one of you is left alive to collect the stakes.
So who invented this infamous game?
Contrary to popular myth, it wasn’t the creation of wardens in the Russian Tsar’s jails forcing prisoners to play while they bet on the outcome. Nor was it bored Russian officers, looking for something to spice up their existence during the long and dark winters.
The game is in fact described for the first time in the short story “Russian Roulette” by Georges Surdez which was published in the 1930 January issue of Collier’s magazine. Here desperate Russian officers, dishonoured and destitute after the 1917 October revolution, remove one bullet from the revolver in front of friends and family then put the gun to their temple and pull the trigger.
Of course, having five bullets in the cylinder is completely different from having just one. The latter is a game, albeit one with insanely high stakes, while the former is basically suicide, with only a small chance that fate might intervene in a positive manner.
How Surdez came up with the idea of Russian roulette, no-one knows for sure. Perhaps he invented it himself. One similar game which was practiced in Tsarist days, however, was known as “Cucu” and is described in several literary sources including Alexander Kuprin’s autobiography “The Duel” from 1905. In this game – usually played by Russian officers after they had consumed plenty of vodka – one officer stood on a chair in the middle of a room, the curtains were drawn and the lights extinguished. The other officers then crept around on the floor, calling out “Cucu!” repeatedly, while the officer standing on the chair fired his revolver in the darkness at the sounds until he ran out of bullets. The object of the game was of course not to be hit, especially not fatally. And you thought baccarat was a tough game!
Another possible source of inspiration to Surdez may be found in the short story collection “A Hero of Our Time” from 1840 by the Russian writer Mikhail Lermontov. There a Serbian lieutenant makes a bet that fate decides our lives and as proof takes down a gun from the wall, puts it to his head and pulls the trigger. It clicks, after which he points the gun at the ceiling and pulls the trigger again … BOOM! The lieutenant then collects the bets from the other, flabbergasted guests.
Has Russian roulette been played in real life? Oh yes, many times. One well-known “loser” in the game was the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who departed this world on 14 April 1930, revolver in hand. Another was the American blues singer Johnny Ace, on Christmas Eve in 1954 in his dressing room just before he was due for his performance. And in 1976, the Finnish magician Aimo Leikas died on stage in front of a packed audience when his Russian roulette act went fatally wrong.
For sheer thrills, Russian roulette is definitely hard to beat. One of the few times it has been taken further was back in 1978 when, according to the newspapers, three drunken Cambodian soldiers took turns jumping on a tank mine – until it went off, killing the entire trio in the blast. Definitely not a game to be suggested, not even for inveterate gamblers – be they of the “die hard” variety or not!
