The testimony of a number of reliable witnesses before the Overman Committee is to the effect that from the very beginning the leadership of the Bolshevist revolution in Russia has been principally Jewish and that the movement had powerful support from Jews returning to Russia in the spring of 1917.
This testimony was taken early in the year 1919 and is contained in the printed Senate Report (a public document) entitled, “Bolshevik Propaganda—Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Sixty-fifth Congress, pursuant to S. Res. 439 and 469.”
Among the witnesses who testified as to the Jewish character of the Bolshevist movement before the Senate Committee was Dr. George A. Simons, a Methodist clergyman who had been for many years in charge of a church and other property belonging to the American Methodists in Petrograd. He was there during the Kerensky régime and during the Bolshevist régime until October 6, 1918.
Dr. Simons testified that “at the beginning of the so-called new régime [Kerensky’s] there was a disposition to glorify the Allies and to make a great deal of what the French Revolution had stood for; within from six to eight weeks there was an undercurrent just the opposite, and things began to loom up in a pro-German way.”[9]
He then told of the arrival of Lenin from Switzerland via Germany, and of Bronstein (alias Trotzky) from New York, and how they conducted a vigorous agitation in Russia while Kerensky was “running up and down the front.” He then goes on to testify as follows:
Mr. Simons. “Kerensky was spending a good deal of his time running up and down the front, trying to hearten the Russian soldiers in their warfare, and he was generally accredited with being a fine orator and doing splendid work, and I do not doubt but what he did manage to keep the men longer than they otherwise would have stayed in, but we were told there were hundreds of agitators who had followed in the trail of Trotzky-Bronstein, these men having come over from the lower East Side of New York. I was surprised to find scores of such men walking up and down Nevsky. Some of them, when they learned that I was the American pastor in Petrograd, stepped up to me and seemed very much pleased that there was somebody who could speak English, and their broken English showed that they had not qualified as being real Americans; and a number of these men called on me, and a number of us were impressed with the strange Yiddish element in this thing right from the start, and it soon became evident that more than half of the agitators in the so-called Bolshevik movement were Yiddish.”
Senator Nelson. “Hebrews?”
Mr. Simons. “They were Hebrews, apostate Jews. I do not want to say anything against the Jews, as such. I am not in sympathy with the anti-Semitic movement, never have been, and do not ever expect to be. I am against it. I abhor all pogroms of whatever kind. But I have a firm conviction that this thing is Yiddish, and that one of its bases is found in the East Side of New York.”
Senator Nelson. “Trotzky came over from New York during that summer, did he not?”
Mr. Simons. “He did.”