Testimony of Roger E. Simmons
Mr. Simmons was Trade Commissioner, connected with the United States Department of Commerce, who was in Siberia and Russia from July, 1917, until November, 1918. He was in Vologda in July, 1918, and gives a graphic account of his imprisonment there by the assistant of the commissar of that community, a man named Iduke. He says:
“Iduke is a Lettish Jew, a man of a very irascible nature, and, on account of his experience in the uprising in Yaroslav, where the protest against the Bolshevik régime had become formidable, he had the reputation of being the cruelest and the most bloodthirsty Bolshevik leader of the revolution.”
Mr. Simmons then narrates how he himself escaped execution only because he succeeded in bribing a Lettish soldier who had been in America to deliver a letter to the Swedish Consul General. An English subject who was imprisoned with him in the same cell was actually executed. Shortly before his death this Englishman said to Simmons:
“I do not like the situation. I don’t understand these people. They are not Russians. I don’t know why they accuse me, nor what they are going to do with me.”[11]
Testimony of an Anonymous Witness
Another witness, who was allowed to withhold his name, testified before the Senate Committee that he left Petrograd November 6, 1917, the night the Bolshevist uprising took place. His testimony on page 321 of the Senate Report is as follows:
“With regard to the industrial conditions before the Bolsheviki rising started, with the revolution of March, 1917, we found that there were quite a number of so-called Americans who had returned to Russia almost immediately after the revolution, commencing, probably, to arrive in April of 1917.”
Senator Nelson. “What sort of people were they? They were people who had been here, were they not?”
Mr. ⸺. “People who had been in this country.”