Drawing Out Life in Russia

He was born in the waning days of one century, endured a second and, with a little luck, will soon greet a third.

“True, I lived only 95 days in the 19th century,” Boris Yefimov says with sly modesty. “And then together with the rest of the planet I entered the 20th century. We could not have suspected that it would be so awful, so troubled, so unprecedented in human history.”

Yefimov is no ordinary centenarian--and not just because he is an eminent political cartoonist. This elfin man with outsize glasses also attended the birth of the Soviet Union and survived to witness its death throes. He remembers the last czar, Nicholas II, and met Lenin, the man who succeeded him in power. He was friends with Trotsky and took orders from Stalin. He stood face to face with Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg trials. He watched from the window of his Moscow apartment as Boris N. Yeltsin fired on the Russian parliament with tanks. And last spring, he cast his vote for Russia’s latest leader, Vladimir V. Putin.

Indeed, it would be hard to find many people alive with more right to call the last 100 years “my century.”

“What is it about my humble person that interests you?” Yefimov croons, his diction slightly old-fashioned, his eyebrows working overtime. “Is it that I’ve turned 100? If so, you must understand that it’s no credit to me--I did nothing to achieve it. . . . I just lived and then lived some more. What’s so special about that?”

Everything, in fact. In Russia’s 20th century--in which tens of millions perished in successive wars, famines, death camps and political purges--just living, and then living some more, was no small feat.

Moreover, for a Jew, a Trotskyist and an “enemy of the people” who practiced the dangerous art of political cartooning, it was a sheer miracle.

It seemed like the movies. The phone rang, and Yefimov picked it up: “Comrade Yefimov? Please hold for Comrade Stalin.”

At the name “Stalin,” Yefimov leaps to his feet, just as he did more than half a century ago, no stiffness apparent in his 100-year-old knees. He sways slightly, holding an old-fashioned receiver to his ear, one hand steadying himself on his writing table. His expression is grim, as if he still hears the dictator’s voice on the other end of the line.

“I heard a throat clear. . . . He didn’t waste time on hellos. I remember it word for word: ‘Yesterday Comrade Zhdanov spoke to you about a satirical cartoon. Do you understand what I’m talking about?’

“Yes, Comrade Stalin,” Yefimov replies, now as then.

It was 1947, just two years after World War II ended and just as a new war, the Cold War, was beginning. A day before, one of Stalin’s top aides, Andrei Zhdanov, had sent guards to haul Yefimov out of a public lecture, carrying him from the hall by his elbows. Backstage, Zhdanov announced that Stalin had chosen the artist for a special job: to draw a cartoon ridiculing a U.S. military buildup in the Arctic.

Yefimov broke out in a cold sweat. It was less than a decade since Stalin had given the cartoonist’s older brother a similar “special assignment,” only to order the sibling killed soon after. It was no honor to be singled out by Josef Stalin.

“Comrade Stalin sees the cartoon something like this,” Zhdanov told him. “Gen. Eisenhower arrives at the North Pole with a large army, spoiling for a fight. And an ordinary American stands next to him and asks, What’s going on, General? Why so much military activity in such a peaceful place? And Eisenhower answers: Can’t you see that the Russians are threatening us?”

Yefimov spent the night sketching. He pondered long and hard over how to represent the Soviet side--he’d received no instruction on that score--and finally decided to draw a family of Eskimos, natives of the Russian far north. He depicted them as poor and primitive, living in an igloo, surrounded by reindeer, polar bears and a befuddled-looking penguin. A fur-clad child holds an Eskimo ice cream bar. As a cartoonist, stereotypes were Yefimov’s stock in trade.

“Someone will pick it up at 6 p.m.,” Stalin said over the phone. The conversation was over.

Yefimov panicked. It was already 3:30 p.m., and he was only half done. Normally, it would take an entire day to finish.

“I was like a chess player when his time has run out--there’s no time to think, only to act,” he says. “And you know, sometimes miracles happen.” He finished just as the messenger rang his bell.

Stalin Marks Up Cartoon in Red Crayon

Two days later, he was summoned to Zhdanov’s Kremlin office and picked up the sketch. In his crude hand, Stalin had added the labels “North Pole” and “Alaska” and the title “Eisenhower to the Defense” in red crayon and pencil.

That version now hangs in Yefimov’s hallway, under glass, the paper yellowed but the red crayon still bright.

Yefimov chuckles as he points to the one mistake Stalin didn’t catch: “He didn’t notice the penguin. When it was published, many people called or sent me letters asking where in the Arctic I had seen a penguin. But when they were told that Stalin had approved the drawing, they bit their tongues.”

What did he think about Americans when he drew this kind of cartoon? Did he believe they were a real threat?

“I’ll tell you frankly--in those times you didn’t think too much. You did what you were told if you wanted to save your neck,” he says. “So if they said Americans were our enemies, imperialists who wanted to start a new war and smash the Soviet Union--well, so that’s what they were.”

His Brother Has Been Most Important to Him

Yefimov’s brother Mikhail died 61 years ago, but he is still the most important person in the cartoonist’s life. His portrait dominates the wall in Yefimov’s bedroom, and his legacy still shadows the younger brother.

Yefimov was born Boris Fridland on Sept. 28, 1900, in Kiev, the second son of a Jewish shoemaker. Mikhail was already 2. The family soon moved to Belostok, now the Polish city of Bialystok, where the boys grew up.

His earliest memory is of standing for a photograph at age 2--a pouting cherub in knickers with long hair, clutching a ball in his right hand. He is sulking because the photographer gave Mikhail, who is gripping his other hand, the more desirable prop: a toy rifle.

“Misha was more lively, talented, smarter,” Yefimov says, “while I was quiet and obedient.” And when his brother decided to support the new Bolshevik government, young Boris followed.

It was not a straightforward decision. He revered the czar and remembers standing with his father in a crowded Kiev street in 1911 to see the royal family drive by in a coach. But even then his illusions of the monarchy were fading.

Czar Was Just ‘an Ordinary Man’

“In my mind I had pictured the czar in his crown and mantle. But what I saw was an ordinary man in a military jacket with epaulets, a good-looking officer. The czarina was in an enormous hat and the daughters. . . .” His voice trails off. “They were gone in a moment.”

During World War I, his family fled Belostok as the Germans approached. Yefimov recalls a Zeppelin hovering over the city, harbinger of the advancing army.

In the fall of 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power, Boris was studying in Kiev. But Mikhail was in the thick of things in St. Petersburg, slowly abandoning his studies to work as a journalist. He had supported the overthrow of the czar and the leader of the provisional government, Alexander Kerensky. He didn’t particularly like the Bolsheviks and their leader, V.I. Lenin, considering them a half-step above criminals.

But slowly a sense of order returned to the capital, and by the fall of 1918, Mikhail had made his peace with the new regime and applied to join the Communist Party.

Meanwhile, in Kiev, revolution decayed into civil war. Boris tried to keep out of sight as half a dozen armies--various combinations of nationalists, Bolsheviks, monarchists, Germans and Poles--swept back and forth through Ukraine. Power changed hands in the Ukrainian capital a dozen times.

The Bolsheviks first occupied Kiev in early 1918, slaughtering hundreds of “bourgeois” before fleeing a few weeks later. But when they recaptured the city two years later, many residents, including Boris, were ready to forgive their earlier excesses. Some of the other occupying armies had been equally bloodthirsty, and the monarchist White Guards had killed tens of thousands of Jews.

With the arrival of the new Soviet world order, the brothers abandoned the Jewish-sounding family name. Mikhail took the surname Koltsov, and Boris became Yefimov--from their father’s first name, Yefim.

Yefimov took work as a secretary in the military publishing department, printing posters and brochures for the regime. At some point, Mikhail suggested that he start drawing--Yefimov had always loved to doodle. And this way the brothers could work together.

“So I taught myself as I went along,” Yefimov recalls. “My first drawing was a success--they published it. Then they published a second. And before I knew it, I was drawn into this work. And in my old age, they even gave me a degree for it!”

Trotsky Enthralls the Young Yefimov

Yefimov was 18 the first time he heard Leon Trotsky. The teen was standing in a crowd in Kiev’s central square, which was packed so tightly he could barely move.

“His voice was electric; it rang out across the entire square, even without a microphone,” Yefimov recalls. “I could never have imagined then that he would become friendly with me.”

At the time, Trotsky was more popular than Lenin, his fame bolstered by his strategic abilities in fighting the civil war and his oratorical skills in drawing people to the Bolshevik cause. One of them was Yefimov.

“He was overflowing with talent,” Yefimov gushes like a smitten youth. “I’ve never heard a better speaker in my entire life--beautiful words, beautiful ideas, powerful locution. A brilliant man.”

Five years later, having followed his brother into journalism, Yefimov nervously knocked on the door of Trotsky’s office carrying his first collection of cartoons, which was soon to be published.

“He rose graciously, walked toward me and said in his famous voice, ‘My, how young you are!’ But I had an answer ready: ‘Lev Davidovich,’ ” Yefimov says, using the formal Russian manner of address, “ ‘at my age, you’d already twice escaped from exile.’ That pleased him.”

Trotsky paged through the portfolio, liked what he saw, and agreed to write a foreword.

Yefimov reaches behind his table and grabs the volume from the shelf. It falls open to the introduction: “L. Trotsky. 20 July 1924.”

It was not a propitious time to ally oneself to Trotsky, who was already in a power struggle with Stalin, the heavy-handed Communist Party leader and future dictator. The editor of the newspaper Izvestia, Yuri Steklov, agreed only reluctantly to print the introduction.

“And the following paradox resulted,” Yefimov recounts. “Steklov paid with his life for his decision to publish this article, dying somewhere in exile. And I, about whom Trotsky wrote such praise, I should have been jailed 10 times over. But I wasn’t touched.”

History repeated itself a few years later. Yefimov’s brother, who had founded the illustrated journal Ogonyok, ignored a warning from Stalin in 1923 not to publish a photo spread on Trotsky.

“Stalin followed the Eastern principle: Revenge is a dish that should be eaten cold,” Yefimov explains. “He would wait years and decades.”

In Mikhail’s case it was 15 years. In 1938, he had just returned to the Soviet Union after covering the Spanish Civil War for the Communist Party newspaper Pravda. Mikhail had begun to cut a well-known figure at home and abroad, even becoming acquainted with Ernest Hemingway, who used him as the basis for Karkov, the Russian journalist in the novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

Stalin asked--that is, ordered--Mikhail to deliver a lecture in Moscow’s Central House of Writers on the “Short Course in the History of the Communist Party.” On Dec. 12, 1938, Mikhail did as he was told to a packed audience. Then Yefimov invited him home for tea and cookies.

“He said, ‘Tea and cookies sounds nice, but there’s work waiting for me over at Pravda,’ ” Yefimov says. “And so we parted forever. What was waiting for him at Pravda was an order for his arrest.”

The next day, Yefimov packed a suitcase and waited for the secret police. It was a rule of Stalin’s terror that when somebody was arrested as an “enemy of the people,” his close family and associates were rounded up in short order. But the knock on the door never came.

“An order for my arrest was already prepared. All it needed was Stalin’s permission. But instead he said, ‘Don’t touch him.’ So I wasn’t touched, and now here I am, sitting in front of you.”

Mikhail was executed 13 months later, seven months before Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico.

Why was Yefimov spared?

“It seems Stalin needed a good, experienced cartoonist,” he posits. “He loved cartoons as much as Trotsky. It was one thing they had in common.”

‘What Are You Going to Do, Hang Yourself?’

Russians have a saying: History doesn’t ask what might have been.

Yefimov doesn’t ask either. He doesn’t ask why he survived and his brother did not. He doesn’t ask whether compromise was too high a price to pay for survival.

“We were afraid all the time,” he recalls. “But human beings--we’re creatures who can get used to anything. What are you going to do, hang yourself? No, you live and then you go on living. They haven’t touched you; they took your neighbor. But that’s your neighbor, not you.”

More often than not, survival is precisely the art of compromise. Yefimov made many. He considered Trotsky a friend but drew unflattering caricatures of him when so ordered. He admired Marshal Tito but depicted him as a servile turncoat when the Yugoslav Communist leader fell out of favor.

But Yefimov expresses no regrets--just sorrow. In many ways, survival is its own reward.

“As for Stalin’s relationship to me, I can’t complain. I received two Stalin prizes. In those days, that was no trifle. . . . Yes, he destroyed my brother. 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.”

The more his brother’s death receded into the past, the more Yefimov’s fortunes improved. He was fired from his job at Izvestia, but 18 months later he was hired by the newspaper Trud.

Drawing Defendants at Nuremberg Trials

By World War II, he was working for an army newspaper and was entrusted with some of the nation’s most important propaganda. His style was not subtle: Nazis with hawkish noses and elongated fingers, nearly dripping with avarice. Plump and self-satisfied Western leaders, twiddling thumbs while the Soviet Union fought valiantly and alone. It was what the leadership wanted. And in time, Yefimov became trusted enough to travel abroad. He was sent to the Nuremberg trials, where he sat beside the defendants’ box to draw some of the most hated men in history.

When Stalin died in 1953, the country was seized with a fearsome uncertainty, followed by a slow descent into political and economic stagnation. Under leaders such as the plodding Leonid Brezhnev, Yefimov’s life--like those of his countrymen--became far more predictable and comfortable. He spent more time at conferences and less time drawing. Besides, his eyesight was fading.

By the time the Bolshevik-founded state had failed, so had Yefimov’s eyesight. But it was just as well, he says, because the death of the Soviet Union dealt a fatal blow to political satire--the new Russia just isn’t as funny. “For all intents and purposes,” Yefimov laments, “political cartooning doesn’t exist anymore.”

Last year a cataract operation partially restored the sight in his right eye. So now, as the new century approaches, Yefimov is drawing again. He sits in his sunlit study overlooking the Moscow River, scratching out in ink and paint his memories of Bolsheviks and White Guards, Hitler and Stalin, and the mismatched pair of Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Yeltsin, yoked to an overloaded cart labeled “problems.”

This is where Yefimov expects to be on New Year’s Eve, under the portrait of his dead brother, surrounded by memories of his parents and his two late wives, toasted by his children and grandchildren--now grandparents themselves. He will raise a glass to the new year, and the last century, and those whose histories won’t carry into the new one.

“Fate granted my brother a much shorter life--a mere 40 years. Perhaps it was his years that were added to mine.”

Yefimov looks small and frail. But he has already proved more stubborn than an evil empire, more durable than a century.

“History doesn’t ask what might have been,” he concludes. “What happened, happened. And what will come next--well, we’ll see, won’t we?”