A man who as a political cartoonist lived at the centre of the seismic changes that shook his country throughout the 20th century, and continued to ply his craft into the 21st, Boris Yefimov witnessed the demise of the Tsarist regime, survived the perilous years of Stalinism, and lived on into the comparatively calmer waters of post-Soviet Russia.

There were times when he almost came unstuck. His friendship and admiration for Trotsky almost cost him his life, as it later did that of his elder brother Mikhail. When, in 1924, he published his first book, Politicheskiye Karikatury, with a glowing foreword by Trotsky, the publisher Yuri Steklov, editor of the party paper Izvestia, was for withdrawing it, given Stalin’s wellknown antipathy towards his brilliant political rival. But in the end he did not, a mistake for which he later paid with his life.

As editor of the magazine Ogonyok, Mikhail had, in 1923, published an admiring photospread of Trotsky, in spite of being explicitly warned against it by Stalin. Vengeance was slow in coming, but it caught up with the elder brother in 1938 when he was denounced as an “enemy of the people” and executed in 1940.

Yefimov survived these, and many others who were unfortunate enough to work close to the fearsome head of the Soviet regime between 1924 and his death in 1953. Why? he might often ask himself.

Simply, Stalin was a realist and recognised that Yefimov’s cartoon style — not a weapon of great subtlety but one of great robustness that could leave its targets in no doubt of how they were perceived — was a great asset in the crude propaganda wars that were necessary both in preserving his political ascendancy at home and concentrating the minds of Soviet citizens on the perils that threatened the fabric of nation from “enemies” outside. For his part, Yefimov never again made the mistake of betraying a predilection for anyone else, as he had done with Trotsky. Survival, as he came deeply to understand, depended in Stalin’s Russia on doing exactly what he was told.

As a result he lived throughout momentous times in which many others in his privileged position, and millions of Soviet citizens and soldiers, perished. As a boy he saw the last Tsar, Nicholas II. As a young man during the Civil War, in 1918 he fled for his life from the anti-Communist forces that threatened the Soviet regime. During the Second World War he took part in the defence of Moscow in 1941 and later witnessed the unspeakable conditions in the death camps of Treblinka and Majdanek, and attended the Nuremberg trials.

The death of Stalin, the Cold War, the end of the Soviet Union itself, all passed before his gaze, and he lived on, to become something of a national treasure in the post-Soviet world, not entirely ingenuously lamenting the death of fierce political cartooning as he had known it, content not to be exposed to the fearful risks that accompanied that “excitement”.

His verdict on his life was quintessentially Russian: “You live, and then you go on living. They haven’t touched you, they took your neighbour. But that’s your neighbour, not you.” It is a viewpoint that inhabits much the same mental terrain as that of Solzhenitsyn’s fictional protagonist Ivan Denisovich, who fatalistically counts his blessings on surviving yet another frightful day in the gulag.

Boris Yefimov was born Boris Fridland, the second son of a Jewish shoemaker, in Kiev in 1900. Soon after he was born the family moved to Bialystok, now in Poland.

During the First World War his family fled as the German armies advanced into Russia, and returned to Kiev where he studied law. But he also began to discover a talent as a cartoonist, and during the Civil War some of his caricatures of figures in the White Army — including its leader General Denikin — were published and circulated throughout the Red Army in Kiev, where it established Soviet control over the Ukraine (which had declared itself independent of Russia in November 1917). He later spoke of hearing Trotsky, founder of the Red Army, mesmerising audiences in the town square at Kiev with his inspiring oratory.

In 1920-21 he designed posters and pamphlets for the Communist party and later went to Moscow in the wake of his brother, who worked as an editor for Pravda and offered him commissions to draw political cartoons. His work soon began to apear in such publications as Izvestia, Ogonyok and Krokodil, where their robust anti-capitalist sentiment gained him high favour with the Soviet regime.

In 1922 he joined the staff of Izvestia, and was soon being employed to sing the praises of a Soviet leadership that had at last got on top of its Western-sponsored enemies within the Soviet Union, and repelled an invasion of the Ukraine by Poland in 1920. In the 1920s, deeming the family name of Fridland to sound too Jewish, he changed his surname to Yefimov.