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