Russian Roulette is the tenth novel in the Alex Rider series written by British author Anthony Horowitz. It serves as a prequel to the Alex Rider series but mainly focuses on the childhood of the assassin that appears in many of the books, Yassen Gregorovich.

Plot

Shortly after the Science Museum scene in Stormbreaker, Yassen Gregorovitch, who was staying at a hotel named the " The Traveller", receives an order to kill Alex Rider. The connection the two of them share prompts Yassen to recall his past, by inserting a memory stick which contained his diary in digital format into his Apple Mac laptop.

Yassen reveals that he was named "Yasha" originally and that it evolved into "Yassen" quite automatically. He was born in a small village named Estrov, which was quite a rural area. It didn't have a railway station and it consisted only of a few houses and a church. Yassen's parents worked at a factory nearby, which was said to produce fertilisers. Yassen attended a school in a nearby town; Rosna and befriended a boy named Leo Tretyakov. Yassen and Leo had a great bond of friendship between them and they had smoked cigarettes together, despite being 14, at the time. A passion for helicopters is also revealed in Yassen's character and he has read a lot of magazines regarding helicopters and seems to have had an extensive knowledge concerning them, despite his rural background. It is mentioned on many occasions how Yassen used to look enviously at planes that would fly over his village. However, Yassen had a far reaching bond with his place of birth, which is revealed in the story.

Russian roulette (Russian: Русская рулетка) is a lethal game of chance in which a player places a single round in a revolver, spins the cylinder, places the muzzle against their head, and pulls the trigger. "Russian" refers to the supposed country of origin, and roulette to the element of risk-taking and the spinning of the revolver's cylinder being reminiscent of spinning a roulette wheel.

Because only one chamber is loaded, the player has a one in x chance of hitting the loaded chamber, where x is the number of chambers in the cylinder. So, for instance, for a revolver that holds six rounds, the chance is one in six. That assumes that each chamber is equally likely to come to rest in the "correct" position. However due to gravity, in a properly maintained weapon with a single round inside the cylinder, the full chamber, which weighs more than the empty chambers, will usually end up near the bottom of the cylinder when its axis is not vertical, altering the odds in favor of the player. This only applies to swing-out cylinder type revolvers, and only if the cylinder is spun outside of the revolver and allowed to come to a complete stop before locked back in.

Russian roulette is a lethal game of chance played with a revolver.

Russian roulette may also refer to:

Film and television

Literature

Mathematics

Music

Albums

Artists

Extended plays

Songs

Russian Roulette is the seventh studio album by German heavy metal band Accept, released in 1986. It was again recorded at Dierks-Studios, but the band chose to self-produce rather than bring back Dieter Dierks as producer. It would be the last Accept album to feature Udo Dirkschneider as lead vocalist until the 1993 reunion album Objection Overruled.

The album returns Accept to the darker, heavier sound of releases prior to the more commercial-sounding predecessor Metal Heart. Wolf Hoffmann explained the band's decision: "Maybe we were trying sort of go back to our natural and not polished Accept sound with that record. We weren't really all that happy with the polished and clean-sounding Metal Heart. I was sort of very happy with my guitar playing on that record and very happy with my parts, but I remember the whole vibe of the band was at the time that we don't want to go through this again with Dieter Dierks who had produced Metal Heart."

Peter Baltes explained the album's title and front cover as an expression of the strong anti-war themes throughout the record, showing war as a game of russian roulette: "It means - go and play the game y'know, what a silly game it is. One will die definitely."