Russian Roulette Play

History of Russian roulette

The English name is from 1937. The story people tell about Russian officers is older than the evidence for it. This site keeps the name, and plays the round on a phone.

Where the name shows up

The earliest known printing is a short story called Russian Roulette, by Georges Surdez, in the 30 January 1937 issue of Collier's. A character says he heard the game from the Russian army in Romania around 1917. In his telling, an officer pulls a revolver, takes one cartridge out, spins the cylinder, and pulls the trigger.

Surdez puts the chance of the gun firing at five to one. One chamber empty, the rest live. That is the reverse of the one-in-six picture that came later.

Newspapers used the phrase while discussing that story in 1937. By 1938 they were using it on their own. Within a year, some of those reports were about people who had tried it with a real gun. This page does not recount those deaths, and this site does not reenact them.

An older story, a different bet

In 1840 Mikhail Lermontov published The Fatalist, a section of the novel A Hero of Our Time. An officer named Vulich takes a pistol down from the wall. Nobody in the room knows if it is loaded. He puts it to his forehead and pulls the trigger. It does not fire. He aims at a cap, pulls again, and it does.

Readers call that the ancestor. It is a cousin. The weapon is a single-shot pistol, and nobody spins a cylinder. Lermontov is writing about fate, almost a century before the English name exists.

On a screen, the stunt shows up before the magazine does. The 1925 film The Night Club includes a version, years before Collier's printed the name.

How the odds flipped

The version that stuck is one live round in a six-chamber revolver, so the first pull is 1 in 6. Surdez had described five live rounds and one empty. Six is simply the chamber count people picture on a revolver. It is not a number the 1917 story proved.

The officer anecdote lives in that Collier's piece, told by a character. No army record has turned up to show that Russian officers actually played it as a habit. Treat it as camp folklore that a pulp writer put on the page, unless a better source appears.

From a stunt to a saying

After the 1930s the phrase left the gun. Papers used it for a risk someone did not have to take, in diplomacy, medicine, and sport. The 1978 film The Deer Hunter, directed by Michael Cimino, fixed the image for people who had never read Collier's. The scenes people remember do not use a revolver, so they are not the cylinder game from 1937.

The game on this site

Russian Roulette here is a pass-the-phone party game. A pull plays a click or a bang, and most phones vibrate. There is no gun.

Sudden death uses six chambers and one live round, because that is the picture the name carries now. The first pull is 1 in 6, not the five-to-one firing chance in the 1937 story. With three or more players still in, a fresh cylinder has one chamber per player. The odds page has the table, and how to play walks the screens.

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