Re: Russian roulette
When I was a precocious little kid, I’d overheard some friends of my parents talking about a recent trip to Monte Carlo in which they played roulette for the first time. I suppose I was very uncharacteristically quiet that evening, because my mom asked me if I was okay. I remember asking her why her friends would want to shoot themselves in the head. A few things were learned that day: I learned that roulette was that gambling game with the spinny thing and the little metal ball, and she learned that I was watching De Niro movies at my friend’s house.
To those unfamiliar with the concept, Russian roulette is a particularly psycho game of chance centrally featured in the Robert De Niro movie, “The Deer Hunter”, and popular with cowardly suicidal loners who don’t want to take responsibility for their own lives or deaths. It is also a popular Internet game, apparently (the strip version looks kind of interesting and f’ed up), and an obscenely overused metaphor for reckless behavior, eg “Is President Bush playing Russian roulette with the Palestinians?”.
(update: Russian roulette involves loading a revolver with one bullet (or removing one bullet from a loaded revolver), spinning the cylinder, putting the barrel to one's head, and pulling the trigger. If the hammer falls on an empty chamber, you live. If not, you die.)
An unusual set of circumstances has got me thinking about this particular topic. First, this morning, “The Deer Hunter” was on AMC, so I watched Christopher Walken take it in the head over eggs Benedict. This reminded me of the Russian movie I saw the other day which had, in the first five minutes, a major character methodically unloading a pistol except for the last chamber, spinning the cylinder, putting the barrel to his head and pulling the trigger. I was surprised to be surprised to see this, and I realized I’d always imagined Russian roulette had nothing actually to do with Russia or Russians. I just assumed it was based on one of those offensive cultural stereotypes, like anything kinky and sexual is called French, anything complicated and nonsensical is Chinese, and anything insane and/or violent is Russian.
So I did a little research, and I found that RR is one of those ambiguous cultural things that nobody really knows much about, but according to “The Straight Dope” website, there are two historical references to it: the first is a short story by Georges Surdez published by Colliers magazine in 1937, where a Russian officer in the French foreign legion describes it as something Russian officers in Romania did in 1917 (except it’s the version with five loaded chambers and one unloaded one). There’s also a sort of reference in Lermontov’s “A Hero of our Time”, where a bunch of officers are sitting around discussing the nature of fate, and one grabs a pistol off the wall, points it at his head, pulls the trigger, and it doesn’t fire. Another officer takes the gun, points it away, pulls the trigger, and it fires.
So maybe there’s something to that Russian cultural stereotype.
9:50:32 AM 
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