Acclaimed Soviet cartoonist recalls brushes with history

MOSCOW -- Boris Yefimov remembers his telephone call from Josef Stalin as if it were yesterday -- the dictator's stern tone, the quick beating of his own heart.

Yefimov, the Soviet Union's most celebrated political cartoonist, had a front seat on the roller-coaster of the 20th century. No wonder he plans to thank God when he opens his eyes on his 102nd birthday Saturday.

At a news conference Friday, the spry, diminutive Yefimov gleefully recounted how he fought the Nazis with laughter and fired irony at the Americans during the Cold War. And he lamented the death of his art in a world where enemies are harder to define and thus harder to mock.

A Jew and a supporter of Stalin's enemy Leon Trotsky, Yefimov might have shared the fate of millions of others were it not for Stalin's appreciation of his art. Millions of people died during Stalin's rule, executed or during brutal imprisonment.

Yefimov's first encounter with Stalin came in 1937, at the height of the purges. On Friday, he recalled a late-night call from his editor, Lev Mekhlis, at Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party.

Mekhlis asked him to come into the office for a message "from him."

"There was no need to say which 'he,'" Yefimov recalled. "There was only one 'he' with a capital H."

At a meeting the next day, Mekhlis conveyed Stalin's concern.

"He noticed that when you draw Japanese samurai, you always draw them with big teeth sticking out," Yefimov quoted him as saying. "Well, he said you shouldn't do that because it insults the dignity of every Japanese person."

"I said, 'OK, no more teeth."'

First strike in Cold War

Ten years later, the phone rang again. This time it was the Communist Party's Central Committee, instructing him to come in to see Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov.

Zhdanov described a cartoon Stalin wanted as one of the first strikes in the Cold War. In Stalin's vision, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower arrives at the North Pole with an army. An ordinary American asks, "What's going on, general? Why such military activity in such a peaceful place?" Eisenhower answers, "Can't you see the Russian threat is looming here?"

Yefimov has acknowledged ambivalence about his role as a dictator's helper, but expresses pride in the historic role of his profession.

"To a certain extent, cartoons were weapons," he said.

But those days are gone.

"It's a new era, my dear comrades," Yefimov said. "The situation in the world and in our country is too complicated to approach it so primitively."