In this 1941 cartoon, Boris Yefimov celebrated Nazi Germany's defeat at the Battle for Moscow, showing German troops carrying a coffin inscribed with the words "Myth of the Invincibility of the German Army."In 1947, Joseph Stalin went to Russian political cartoonist Boris Yefimov and ordered him to draw U.S. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower arriving with a large army to claim the North Pole. The next day, Yefimov received a phone call from Stalin inquiring about the cartoon.
"A few seconds later, I heard that familiar voice. He did not greet me but got straight to the point. 'The cartoon we spoke to you about yesterday, I'd like to see it by six o'clock today.' It was already 3:30. I thought to myself: 'I'm dead.' To do all that remained in two and a half hours was impossible."
Cartoonist Boris Yefimov at a news conference in Moscow in 2002.Yefimov managed to finish the work just as the messenger boy was arriving to pick it up. But a couple of days later, when he was summoned to party headquarters, there was a further surprise in store – the Soviet leader had managed to find time to rewrite the cartoon's caption and make corrections in red crayon.
"As for Stalin's relationship to me, I can't complain," Yefimov told The LA Times in 2000.
Yefimov died Wednesday at the age of 108.
During his lifetime Yefimov saw revolution, civil war, genocide, two world wars, the Cold War and a putsch. As a boy he saw the last Tsar, Nicholas II, and later he met Lenin. His cartoons spanned virtually the entire history of the Communist state, from shortly after the 1917 revolution to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Yefimov lamented that "political cartooning doesn't exist anymore."
Among his most memorable drawings was one showing a wretched-looking Hitler, who is said to have ordered Yefimov shot if the Nazis captured Moscow during World War II. Instead, Yefimov was sent after the war to the Nuremberg trials to draw the Nazis as they faced justice.
Next, he was then ordered to poke fun at the Western powers in what was transforming into the Cold War. His drawings portrayed Uncle Sam and American and British leaders as warmongers and plump, money-grubbing capitalists with sagging cheeks.
Yefimov acknowledged ambivalence about his role as Stalin's helper, made even harder when his brother, journalist Mikhail Koltsov, was killed in the purges overseen by Stalin in the 1930s. Yefimov was also once a friend of revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, who was killed in exile on Stalin's orders.
Still, Yefimov expressed great pride in the role he played in Russian history.
"I received two Stalin prizes. In those days, that was no trifle. . . . He was a villain. He murdered many innocent people. A dreadful man! But still, a certain human logic wins out. He is also the person who granted me my life, my freedom, my work."
View a gallery of some of Yefimov's cartoons here.
And here are links to news reports of Yefimov's passing:
Boris Yefimov dies at 108; political cartoonist lampooned Soviet Union's enemies
LA Times
Russian political cartoonist Yefimov dies at 108
CBC News
Soviet Political Cartoonist Yefimov Dead at 108
Moscow Times
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