In one of his books he recounts how after a politician in power gave a speech to a group, the whole crowd stood and applauded. This continued for minutes. Then more minutes. After many minutes of this (I forget the exact number.....15?) one elderly man stopped applauding and sat down.
He was taken and executed.
I will never forget that story.
That was the three hundred member Supreme Soviet listening to a speech by Stalin. When he finished the entire hall broke into a standing ovation that went on and on and on until everyone was drenched in sweat but were afraid to stop applauding.
When the one delegate stopped clapping & sat down, all the others instantly joined him. He was not immediately executed but was arrested & thrown into the Lubyanka where an NKVD officer shouted at him, “Don’t EVER be the first to stop applauding Comrade Stalin!!”
However, to prevent a recurrence the Praesidium (higher than the Supreme Soviet) ordered the installing of large bells in the assembly hall. After each subsequent speech by Stalin the standing ovation would take place until it was deemed appropriate (by whom?) to ring the bells at which the exhausted delegates could take their seats.
Solzhenitsyn is missed by lovers of freedom everywhere. After his 1978 speech at Harvard the Left tried to demonize him as a closet tsarist.
In fact, it appears that post-soviet Russia is moving in the direction of economic & other freedoms, with a revival of religion & rising birthrate reflecting new hope. Perhaps Solzhenitsyn is being vindicated in his own homeland after all.
There were several Party Congress shots of exactly the scene you describe (minus anyone sitting down): they must have applauded until their hands were numb. At first it was hilarious until you realized the level of fear that must have been involved. The Poles I was with regarded it with a mixture of amusement and angry disgust at their national humiliation.
When Stalin spoke, they would ring a bell to tell everyone to stop applauding.
Another of his stories is one of the peasant who had two dogs and named them after Marx and Lenin (or Lenin and Stalin...names like that). The local commie council found out and couldn’t figure out if the peasant was honoring the commies or making fun of them. So they decided to shoot the peasant anyway to make sure.
Saddam Hussein did and North Korea does things like that