A Russian Roulette Death on This Day in History

 

American actor Jon-Erik Hexum, 26, died after playing a simulated Russian roulette with a .44 Magnum pistol loaded with blanks on this day in 1984. The blanks contained paper wadding and when he pulled the trigger against his temple, the wadding was propelled with a force that broke his skull, causing massive brain bleeding.

Russian Roulette is the practice of loading a bullet into one chamber of a revolver, spinning the cylinder, and then pulling the trigger while pointing the gun at one's own head.

The first trace of Russian roulette can be found in the short story "The Fatalist", which was written in 1840 and was part of the collection A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, a Russian poet and writer. In the story, which is set in a Cossack village, the protagonist, Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin, claims that there is no predestination and proposes a bet in order to prove it, laying about twenty gold pieces onto a table. A lieutenant of the dragoons of the Tsar, Vuli?, a man of Serbian origins with a passion for gambling, accepts the challenge and randomly takes one of a number of pistols of various calibres from its nail, cocks it and pours gunpowder onto the pan. Nobody knows if the pistol is loaded or not. "Gentlemen! Who will pay 20 gold pieces for me?", Vulic asks, putting the muzzle of the pistol to his forehead. He then asks Grigory to throw a card in the air, and when this card touches the ground, he pulls the trigger. The weapon fails to fire, but when Vulic cocks the pistol again and aims it at a service cap hanging over the window, a shot rings out and smoke fills the room.

The term Russian roulette was possibly first used in a 1937 short story of the same name by Georges Surdez: "'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 café, 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."

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