Russian Roulette and various revolvers

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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Cecil’s column is: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/991022.html#update

This column contains a lot of nitpicking, which has inspired in me a fit of counter-nitpicking.

John Bushnell of Northwestern states that

If this is true, why was there a specific version of the Nagant M1895 for enlisted men? I have read more than once that there was a double-action version for officers, and a single-action for enlisted men.

Dennis Thompson expounds on the “standard service sidearm of Russian officers in 1917”: the Nagant seven-shooter. He then goes on to say

I’ll grant that I’ve never heard of a swing-out revolver in Russian service, but the whole idea of ruling out Smith & Wessons is incomprehensible. From the 1870s to 1895, the standard Russian sidearm was [dramatic pause] the Smith & Wesson Russian Model. It was a top-break six-shooter. I think it would be perfectly okay to describe the process of close the action on a top-break revolver as “snapping the cylinder back in place” (that phrase could also be used with swing-out revolvers) even though with a top-break you’re snapping the cylinder and the barrel back in place.

So why is it so incomprehensible that some nostalgic Russian Army officer would carry a weapon that was 22 years out of date? Patton’s famous revolvers were Colt single-actions, hardly the state of the art at the time he carried them; I suspect you can find plenty of current U.S. military people who prefer the Colt M1911 to younger SIGs and Berettas.

The real crusher to Thompson’s argument is “Russians used Russian weapons”. Nagant was Belgian; Smith & Wesson were Americans; Hiram Maxim (inventor of Russia’s M1910 Maxim machinegun) was American or British (can’t remember which). Plenty of Russian service weapons might have been built under license in Russia, but that doesn’t change the nature of the weapons the Czarist forces preferred in the early metallic-cartridge era. Russians didn’t start designing weapons (in the modern era) until after the Bolshevik revolution.

Any similarity in the above text to an English word or phrase is purely coincidental.

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FWIW:

From Encyclopedia.com:

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Hilaire Belloc

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Hey, thanks for the bio information. That sort of explains why I can never remember the Maxims’ nationalities. It’s good to know, since I had thought the fella who invented the machinegun and the fella who invented the silencer were the same person.

By the way, tomndebb, where does that quote come from? Sounds very Kiplingish but I don’t know if he was really contemporary with the “Maxim era”…

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Boris B writes:

> By the way, tomndebb, where does that
> quote come from? Sounds very Kiplingish
> but I don’t know if he was really
> contemporary with the “Maxim era”…

It comes from Hilaire Belloc, as you can see if you look just below the quote. Belloc lived from 1870 to 1953. Although he was born in France and didn’t become a British subject till 1902, he lived in England from the age of 2 onwards. I guess I would call Belloc a later contemporary of Kipling.

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In the mid-19th century novel ‘Hero of Our Time’ the Russian writer Turgenev sets one of his characters to playing russian roulette (though they don’t call it that.) Turgenev was really popular in Western Europe, so maybe the term comes from him.

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“Cuckoo” sounds a little like something I read in a bio of Blackbeard.

Supposedly he would (at a table crowded with people) place a gun under it and fire just to see whom it would hit.

Don’t know if it’s true–which is the case with just about anything involving Blackbeard.

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Oh yeah. Sheepish grin I guess I didn’t notice that since it didn’t have the little dash in front of it. In fact, I’m not sure I even would have noticed it was a name, since it’s kind of in the place where people put their sig lines, and I never read those any more since I can never figure out what the heck they mean.

Any similarity in the above text to an English word or phrase is purely coincidental.

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I never understood that game because if you spun it in front of you, you could see if there is a bullet about to be turned into the chamber on the next pull.

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In the mid-19th century novel ‘Hero of Our Time’ the Russian writer Turgenev sets one of his characters to playing russian roulette (though they don’t call it that.) Turgenev was really popular in Western Europe, so maybe the term comes from him.

The Great One Himself previously wrote:

In fact, the only reference to anything like Russian roulette I could find in Russian literature was in the book A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov (1840, translated by Vladimir Nabokov in 1958).

But surely this wasn’t the first English translation! Lermontov was known in the West (maybe less so than Turgenev :slight_smile: )

I read an article some years ago how the English translation of Lermontov’s story reached the West Point in the 1870’s. Russian Roulette became a fad there, resulting in the deaths of several cadets. Sorry I don’t have the reference and a web search produced nothing. Any West Pointers here?

By the way, Lermontov himself wasn’t exactly Russian. He was descended from George Learmont, a Scottish officer who entered Russian service and Russified his name to “Yuri Lermontov”. Much (most?) of his writings are in French. And the character in the book who survived the Russian roulette only to be killed by a drunken Cossack is a Serb. So perhaps it should be called “Scotish-Serbian Roulette” :slight_smile:

You can find the English translation of the hero at ftp://ftp.books.com/eBooks/Fiction/Authors/L/Lermontov/fatalist.htm I’m not sure if it’s Nabokov’s or an older one.

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The specific Belloc quote I posted came from his The Modern Traveller, 1898.

He also had some wonderful poetry for kids. He was a friend of G. K. Chesterton. The following site has a lot of info on him, including some of his poetry and links to other works:
http://www.angelfire.com/va/belloc/society.html

My favorite Belloc story comes from Willard Espy. He relates that once a man came into a NY bookstore asking for a book by a certaim author, pronouncing the name “Hilary BELL-ock.” The clerk proceeded to correct him, noting that the name was French and the pronunciation was “'i-LAIR Buh-LOKE.” The customer nodded and took the book, then asked to charge it (back in the pre-plastic days when “charging” required a previously established account). The clerk said “Certainly, and to whom should we send the bill?” “Hilary BELL-ock.”, came the reply.

Tom~

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Well, I’m very hurt that it still says “Russian roulette origin shot down in flames” on the home page. By now it should say, “Russian roulette origin restored to original glory by one of the TM’s most brilliant geniuses” or something. whimper

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What are you arguing, that every Russian officer who committed suicide playing Russian roulette did so with an out-of-date revolver he had saved for the purpose? Remember, the fellow in the story is describing a scenario that supposedly occurred repeatedly. You can invent some cockamamie explanation that would account for the swing-out cylinder, but the simplest explanation is that the author was unfamiliar with Russian military sidearms.

Boris, honestly. It is reasonably clear that Thompson meant “Russians used standard-issue Russian weapons.” The fact that the frigging inventor wasn’t Russian is immaterial.

I think we’ll have to go with the "or something.

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No. I was arguing that it was not inconceivable for certain Russian military personnel to have S&Ws. Maybe they trusted six .44-caliber slugs more than seven .30-caliber slugs. Maybe they preferred the rapid reloading permitted by the S&W’s break-action. Hell if I know.

Sure. So maybe it usually occurred with the Nagant and sometimes occurred with the S&W, and the latter was what made it into the text.

And I wait, with baited breath, for you to explain how my explanation is cockamamie, just as I wait for you to explain the relevance of a swing-out cylinder to a debate about a top-break gun and a gate-loading gun.

The quote I was referring to is

Maybe you have some psychic bond which enables you to figure out what Thompson is talking about, but I don’t. The only way in which a Smith & Wesson Russian Model is non-Russian is that it was designed in the U.S. (on the advice of a Russian nobleman, IIRC). So I made the only assumption I felt to be reasonable.

I gave an example of a Smith & Wesson which was a standard-issue Russian weapon some years earlier, as a way of debunking the idea that Smith & Wessons would never ever be found in Russian hands in 1917. I don’t know how to make the connection any clearer than that.

Oooh, cut down by the master!
What, exactly, is the deal here? Do you feel the need to defend your column? I thought it was obvious from the OP that I was critiquing the replies of two specific people, a historian and a gun collector, neither of which has anything obvious to do with the Straight Dope organization.

So I’m a little taken aback by the indignant tone of your response, Mr. Adams. Is it because I said that your “column contains a lot of nitpicking”? Sorry, should have said, “The webpage on which this column exists includes a lot of replies which contain a lot of nitpicking”. That comment, and my arguments which follow, are simply not about anything you have said.

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Of course not. I was put off by the smug tone of your remarks, e.g., that a certain argument you made was a “real crusher.” Dennis Thompson made a valid point that I neglected in my column, namely that standard issue Russian military sidearms do not work in the manner somewhat airily described in the short story that gave rise to the term “Russian roulette.” The obvious conclusion to draw from this was that the story’s author had no firsthand knowledge of such a game or of the Russian military in general. Your supposition that a czarist officer MIGHT have found a different type of weapon, your observation that the inventor of the standard Russian sidearm was not a Russian, your conviction that these were somehow powerful arguments … I’m sorry, I allowed myself to become irritated. Never mind. Go back to what you were doing.

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Here is a link to S&W’s history page, including stuff on their .44 Russian model: http://smith-wesson.com/misc/story.html

Relevant info begins with the ninth paragraph but the tenth is most interesting.

and this contract was followed up by many others. Given that some of these guns are still on the market ( http://www.armchairgunshow.com/swrusc.html )it wouldn’t surprise me if working models were plentiful in 1917.

I don’t want to make people think like me, I want them to think like me of their own free will.

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And the older tradition was that an officer’s sidearm was his personal property, like his uniforms, although that is no longer the usual practice in the USA. But what was it in the Czarist army?

John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams

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I decided to bump this baby since it does feature a personal appearance by Cecil Adams. It’s not about me. Really.