Few cultural inventions carry as much weight as the game of Russian Roulette. For many, the concept conjures a visceral image: a revolver’s cylinder spun, a tense moment of anticipation, and the high stakes of life and death.
The mechanics of Russian Roulette are straightforward. A single bullet is loaded into a revolver’s cylinder, which is spun to obscure the bullet’s location. The player then presses the barrel to their head — or, in some versions, to another player — and pulls the trigger. With a standard six-shot revolver, the odds are chilling: a one-in-six chance of death. If the chamber is spun before each pull, every round resets the odds. Without respinning, the probability escalates with each trigger pull, culminating in certain death by the final chamber.
Although Russian Roulette is often used as a metaphor for taking reckless risks with potentially catastrophic consequences, such as brinkmanship in nuclear arms negotiations, some have literally played it. Actually, quite a few people have died playing Russian Roulette — tragedies that become all the more eerie once you learn that Russian Roulette most likely started as fiction.
It sounds obvious that Russian Roulette was invented by some mad fellow in, well, Russia. However, you might be surprised to learn that the game’s origins can be traced back to a 1937 short story. Russian Roulette was published by the Swiss-American adventure writer Georges Surdez in Collier’s Illustrated Weekly.
A Game of Fate and Fiction
In the tranquil Swiss town of Biel-Bienne, Georges Surdez spent his early years surrounded by the precision of his father’s watchmaking craft and the mysticism of his mother’s tarot cards. Born in 1900, Surdez grew up in a bustling household with three older sisters and two brothers. But tragedy marred his early life. One sister died in a sledding accident, and his elder brother later fell to his death from a tree. These losses, etched into his formative years, perhaps fed the rich emotional undercurrents that later defined his writing.
As a child, Surdez was an avid reader. He especially enjoyed reading about tales of adventure and daring exploration. His bookshelf overflowed with tales of William Tell, Napoleonic conquests, and the French Foreign Legion. These early influences would foreshadow his path as a writer, though the journey to that calling was anything but direct.
At the age of 12, Surdez’s family relocated to the United States, leaving the picturesque landscapes of Switzerland for the crowded streets of New York City. For young Georges, this shift was not easy. He was ridiculed for being foreign and for his weird accent, with classmates taunting him as a “dirty Swiss.” Alienated, he dropped out of school at 16 and began searching for a place where he could belong.
That search took him to Côte d’Ivoire at 19, where he hoped to carve out a life in the French colony. There, surrounded by the rugged beauty of Africa, Surdez began to find inspiration for stories. His travels took him to faraway, exotic places like Morocco and Sudan. He returned to America in 1920.
During his time in New York, Surdez realized that some people would pay good money to publish stories. Since he thought of himself as a decent writer, Surdez tried his luck with some stories. By 1922, he had begun selling short stories to pulp magazines like Adventure, a publication that would accept more than 100 of his works. His early stories spanned crime thrillers and romantic tales, including one adapted for film in 1927 by a production company operated by none other than Joseph Kennedy, the father of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
In 1937, already a seasoned writer, Georges Surdez penned what would become his most enduring work, Russian Roulette. As journalist Beat Kuhn reminds us, the story published in Collier’s Illustrated Weekly introduced readers to Sergeants Burkowski and Feldheim, characters stationed with the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. The Russian Sergent Burkowski, a compulsive gambler, introduces Feldheim to a deadly game he claims was practiced by Russian officers during World War I. In this game, a single bullet is loaded into a revolver’s cylinder, which is then spun. The player places the muzzle against their head and pulls the trigger, risking death with each pull. Burkowski becomes obsessed with this game, ultimately leading to his demise. The story is framed as a letter from Sergeant Feldheim of the French Foreign Legion to his lieutenant, explaining the suicide of Sergeant Burkowski.
From a Storyline to a Symbol of Reckless Risk
Was this game real? Historians remain divided. While some evidence suggests the practice existed in the Russian army, no definitive proof predates Surdez’s story. For instance, in his 1840 novel A Hero of Our Time, Russian writer Mikhail Lermontov includes a scene where a lieutenant wagers his life in a fatalistic gamble.
Set in a Cossack village, the story follows Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin, a disillusioned protagonist, who debates the idea of fate with a Serbian officer, Vulič. To prove his belief in predestination, Vulič wagers his life by selecting a pistol at random, cocking it, and pressing the muzzle to his temple. As the crowd holds its breath, he pulls the trigger — and survives. Later, however, Vulič’s confidence in fate leads to his death, when he is unexpectedly killed by a drunken Cossack. However, revolvers were barely invented during this time and the story refers to one-shot flint pistols.
What is clearer is that Surdez’s fiction gave the game a name and a place in popular culture — and at some point, the fictitious game gained a life of its own. By the 1950s, real-world incidents brought its grim reality into focus. In 1954, rhythm-and-blues singer Johnny Ace died while playing the game. In his autobiography, Malcolm X recounts a moment during his criminal years when he played Russian Roulette to intimidate his associates. He later revealed to co-author Alex Haley that he had rigged the gun to avoid actual danger.
The Nobel Prize-winning physicist William Shockley (the inventor of the transistor) claimed in his autobiography that he once attempted suicide by playing Russian Roulette alone. He survived the attempt. In 1976, Finnish magician Aimo Leikas killed himself in front of a crowd while performing his Russian Roulette after picking the wrong round from a box of assorted live and dummy ammunition. Most recently, in 2016, 25-year-old mixed martial arts fighter Ivan ‘JP’ Cole was found dead in his Dallas apartment after playing a “deadly game of Russian Roulette.”
Its cultural reach extended into art and entertainment as well. In the 1978 film The Deer Hunter, characters are forced into the deadly game by Viet Cong (VC) captors. While writer/director Michael Cimino claimed to have seen newspaper reports confirming the use of Russian roulette as a VC torture method, he has never presented any such evidence. The film’s harrowing portrayal of psychological torment brought the concept to a global audience, though it also sparked copycat incidents among impressionable viewers.
Over time, the term evolved into a metaphor for reckless risk-taking, as when António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, warned in 2024, “We are playing Russian Roulette with our planet,” pointing to the lack of global action on climate change.
For Surdez, the fame of Russian Roulette was a bittersweet legacy. He died of natural causes in 1949, never witnessing how his creation would seep into the global consciousness. Still, it stands as one of many fascinating examples of works of fiction jumping into the world of reality.
