Stalin’s favorite cartoonist still drawing at 104
By Richard Balmforth, Reuters
MOSCOW—Adolf Hitler wanted him executed as soon as German forces took Moscow.
His mocking cartoons of the Soviet Union’s ideological foes in the West, ordered by dictator Josef Stalin himself, prompted angry diplomatic protests.
At 104, Boris Yefimov’s eyesight is failing and he is very hard of hearing. But Stalin’s favorite lampoonist still has the steadiness of hand to sketch every day and a bubbly sense of humor that helps him confront the ghosts of his past.
“I got orders from Stalin. And this is sad for me to say but I often had to ridicule people whom I respected. There was no way to refuse because . . . ,” his voice trails off and he draws the edge of his hand across his neck to indicate execution.
For most of the 20th century—from the Bolshevik Revolution to Mikhail Gorbachev’s “perestroika” reforms—Yefimov dutifully served the Soviet state, creating caricatures of Moscow’s foes for the consumption of the masses.
In the bleak years of World War Two, they sustained the morale of Soviet front-line forces; in the Cold War, they sought to convince people the capitalist world was ultimately doomed.
In a telegram to Yefimov on his September 28 birthday, Russian President Vladimir Putin, a man with a dry wit himself, paid tribute to his “bright talent, depth, humor and wisdom.”
Designed to get a blunt point across to an unsophisticated public, his cartoons published in the leading Soviet newspapers of the day, were far from subtle.
Hitler was a crazed, often wretched-looking, figure. In the Cold War, the US superpower foe was a mean-looking Uncle Sam bristling with missiles—a dollar sign thrown in just in case a reader might miss the point.
“You know the point about my work is that it was a weapon. Cartoons have to flog, to beat with their sharpness, to expose and to mock,” he said.
Spry figure
A tiny figure still remarkably spry on his feet, he lives in a Moscow riverside apartment where his eventful past crowds in around him in books, albums, photos.
He sketches every day largely for pleasure. But he no longer draws political cartoons, he says, because post-Soviet Russia doesn’t lend itself to the genre.
“Can you imagine now that we have contract killings in our country? Every day they kill this director or that businessman. This is not a subject for caricatures. I don’t see how I can make humor from such awful happenings,” he said.
His own age knew a greater terror, though, from above. Stalin’s purges carried off his brother in the lowest moment of his life. Like millions of others he prudently kept silent.
Families of the intelligentsia were arrested en bloc in those days and Yefimov recognizes his obedience and his skill as a cartoonist kept him alive where others perished.
“It was pure economics for him [Stalin]. He was the master of the whole country. He realized he had a good caricaturist that he needed so he said ‘let him live,’” Yefimov said.
Ridicule of Hitler
A Jew, he ridiculed Hitler almost daily during the war. When told Hitler had ordered his execution as soon as Moscow was taken, Yefimov is said to have replied he would rather confront an angry Hitler than face Stalin.
Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill became a regular target after the war. And, when Stalin personally ordered it, he penciled in more weapons onto a cartoon of US Gen. Dwight Eisenhower so that he was “armed to the teeth.”
His friendship with Stalin’s rival corevolutionary, Leon Trotsky, still troubles him and he recalls his last meeting him in 1928, on the eve of Trotsky’s exile to Soviet Central Asia, with the clarity of an event yesterday.
“I told him ‘You know, I think a rest from politics will do you good.’ Trotsky replied: ‘I do not intend to take a rest from politics. Nor will you. You’ll continue drawing your cartoons because you do it well.’”
They parted friends but Yefimov had nonetheless to lampoon Trotsky on Stalin’s bidding, something that weighs on his conscience. After moving around several countries, Trotsky was killed in Mexico by one of Stalin’s followers in 1940.
Yefimov reserves huge praise for Gorbachev—the Soviet Union’s last president and the only Russian leader who actually invited him to the Kremlin.
“He removed the threat of nuclear war. That is why he has my respect. He brought a new leadership style after people like Leonid Brezhnev who could only read from bits of paper,” he said.
After all these years, it is the death of his brother, journalist Mikhail Koltsov, in the purges of the 1930s that haunts him. Editor of the communist party newspaper Pravda, Koltsov was arrested in 1938 by Stalin, spirited away and executed after torture. He was 40.
Yefimov links this now, wistfully, to his own longevity. He gestures toward a portrait of his brother on the wall.
“It may be superstition,” he said. “Now I think that somewhere, in the place where the fate of people is decided, those years that were taken from him were passed on to me. That’s how I consider now my many years.”
===== Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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