“At a 1937 conference of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, Stalin’s people applauded him for eleven consecutive minutes, fearing that the first to stop would be killed or sent to prison. Finally, one man stopped, the director of a paper factory. “To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down,” writes Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. That same night the director of the paper factory was arrested and sent to prison for ten years.”

“At a 1937 conference of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, Stalin’s people applauded him for eleven consecutive minutes, fearing that the first to stop would be killed or sent to prison. Finally, one man stopped, the director of a paper factory. “To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down,” writes Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. That same night the director of the paper factory was arrested and sent to prison for ten years.”

— Steven Hassan