Russian roulette – stimulating hobby, bizarre suicide ritual, or both?
In today’s stressed out world, there’s a huge market for relaxing sounds. You have albums like “
Absolute Ambient vol. 24” where you get hours upon hours of the sounds of
rolling waves, the wind blowing through the trees, raindrops landing in wet grass, or birds
chirping, whales singing and
fruitbats doing whatever it is fruitbats do. The possibilites are endless.
One thing that hasn’t been marketed, though, is what might be the most relaxing sound in the entire world – the “click” of a loaded revolver aimed at your head. The “click” that could have been a “blam”. Although I feel it should be mentioned that if it had been a “blam”, you wouldn’t exactly be around to hear it.
But I digress. What I sat down to do was to write about Russian Roulette. It’s a very simple game, really. It is usually played against others (ideally, there’d be six people at the table), but it could be played by yourself as well. (1) You take a revolver with an empty cylinder. (2) You put one cartridge into it, then spin the chamber around. (thus the name, "roulette".) (3) You aim it at your head and pull the trigger. If you survive, congratulations! Hand the gun to the person sitting next to you!
Though it isn’t really like there are official rules for the game, for various reasons.
- The rules for most other sports and games weren’t all there from the start. Instead, they usually start as simple ideas and then evolve over the years as more and more people got more and more experience with the sport/game and decide what changes that would make it better. However, due to the nature of russian roulette, a person can only get so much experience of playing the game before Darwin takes care of him. In other words, it’s still in the “a simple idea” stage.
- There’s noone who can be arsed writing anything definite down, as all the people who’d be interested in standardised rules for the game are quite likely to vanish off the face of the earth pretty soon anyway.
- If you’re insane and/or suicidal enough to actually play it, it’s not your top priority if you’re using a standard regulation .44 Smith & Wesson.
Speaking of insane and/or suicidal, a common question is why the hell anyone would want to play the game? Obviously, there are some people who actually do it voluntarily, and don’t care if they live or die, but most of the time this was played by people who were forced to do it. Russian prisoners have been forced to play it, while the guards watched on and betted on the outcome. It’s illegal today (obviously), but it still happens in the poverty stricken areas of Russia. It’s also been used as torture in wartime (see Deer Hunter).
The origins of the sport are not really known. It probably does come from Russia, but not much more is known. The Russian army used six-cylinder revolvers in the late 19th century, so it'd make sense if it started there. According to The Straight Dope it appeared in writing for the first time in the short story “Russian Roulette”, written by Georges Surdez in 1937. A Russian soldier 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."
Note that the odds in this version have been
inversed – now you have a 1/6 chance of
survival, instead (though the version where only one cartridge is in the cylinder also appears in the story). This is only for the
hardcore Russian roulette
fanatics and is not recommended for people who're new to the game.
Either way, it’s a very fascinating sport which I predict will only become more popular in the future. There’ll always be a steady supply of people who’re suicidal – in fact, if the current trends are any indication, it will even increase in the future! And with the advent of extreme sports, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a Russian roulette revival. It is, after all, the first real extreme sport, and at the same time the most extreme one the world will ever see.
It’s only a matter of time.
Node your Homework (Why yes, I do get fucked up assignments!)
Straight Dope article can be found at http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a991022.html