I run into this story in twitter today about a heckler during Khruschchev's "Secret Speech", AKA "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Cult_of_Personality_and_Its_Consequences
This is the story, which is told without a source given:
“A heckler once interrupted Nikita Khrushchev in the middle of a speech in which he was denouncing the crimes of Stalin. “You were a colleague of Stalin’s,” the heckler yelled, “why didn’t you stop him then?” Khrushschev apparently could not see the heckler and barked out, “Who said that?” No hand went up. No one moved a muscle. After a few seconds of tense silence, Khrushchev finally said in a quiet voice, “Now you know why I didn’t stop him.” Instead of just arguing that anyone facing Stalin was afraid, knowing that the slightest sign of rebellion would mean certain death, he had made them feel what it was like to face Stalin—had made them feel the paranoia, the fear of speaking up, the terror of confronting the leader, in this case Khrushchev. The demonstration was visceral and no more argument was necessary.”
The same story is repeaded in this NPR interview, but only as a hearsay:
SIMON: I've heard a story that somebody sitting in that chamber who heard Khrushchev's remarks that day had the effrontery, audacity, even courage to shout at Khrushchev, where were you?
Mr. RETTIE: I have heard that somebody had stood up while Khrushchev was listing the torture systems and the murderings that had gone on and shouted well if he was so bad, why didn't you get rid of him? And Khrushchev stopped and said, Who said that? And there was silence in the hall. So he repeated himself. Who said that? And there was still silence, and he said, Well, now you understand why we didn't do anything.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5233399&t=1613499783615
Does anybody know if it really happened - did somebody ask that question and did he gave that answer? Is there a trustworthy source for it somewhere?
So I attempted to track down the original source for this, since most of the memoirs I've read emphasize how dead silent it was during and after the speech (for example, the future head of the KGB, Vladimir Semichastny, said that "you could hear a bug fly by"). This anecdote had already taken hold by 1956, though, because I found a copy of a New York Times article about in the [Senate Congressional Record] (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1956-pt7/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1956-pt7-10-1.pdf) (page 46). That article attributes the anecdote to Theodore Khagan, Deputy Director of Public Affairs for the United States High Commission in Germany, who was responsible for the Commission's radio and newspapers. I couldn't find the original article that Khagan wrote and/or published. I did find a slight variation on the story from a [local American newspaper] (https://www.newspapers.com/image/87714915/) published May 22, 1956 where instead of heckling Khrushchev, the delegate had a note passed to him which he then read aloud. They attribute this story to "Washington diplomats". The other references to this story I found, like [this speech] (https://www.jstor.org/stable/25658900 ) from CNN's Ralph Begleiter, tend to qualify the story by using words like "alleged". Begleiter himself calls the story "possibly apocryphal".
The fact that it's difficult to find an actual person to attribute this story to already makes me suspicious, because you would think that something like that would have made its way into the memoirs of somebody there and would make tracing the anecdote back its source pretty easy. Another thing that makes this story seem dubious to me is that Khrushchev addresses that exact question in the speech. "Some comrades may ask us: Where were the members of the Politbiuro? Why did they not assert themselves against the cult of the individual in time? And why is this being done only now?" He then proceeds to list off multiple reasons why they didn't intervene. He does talk about Stalin's repression and how scared they all were (he tells an interesting anecdote about how Bulganin once told him that, after going to dinner with Stalin "he does not know where he will be sent next – home or to jail"), but he doesn't phrase it anywhere close to how it's usually presented in that anecdote.