Rzhanitsky had three unspent bullets left in his revolver but, maddened by his failure and perhaps, in his agitation, forgetting that they were there, he flung his Browning against the rocks.
—Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, (London: Vintage, 2002), 320.
I used to own a Browning, as one of a number of classic weapons. Browning handguns and machine guns were certainly present in Russia – Stolypin after all was assassinated with a Browning – but Browning never made a revolver. I read on social media that while automatics were becoming introduced “revolver” was a term commonly used for any handgun, so one could assume that this was, in fact, a Browning, just labeled “revolver” by Hayward and Harari’s translation, but we were also told Rzhanitsky had earlier fired three shots, leaving three. Now perhaps the suggestion is that he started out with six in his mag, but this to me seems less probable than the idea Pasternak pictured this weapon when fully loaded containing six bullets. It was not a Browning.