STALIN'S FAVORITE CARTOONIST

Josef Stalin’s favorite cartoonist, Boris Yefimov, died in early October, just two days after his 109^th birthday. Yes, odd as it is to contemplate, Stalin liked cartoons. They were, for one thing, highly effective tools for propagandizing in a largely illiterate country. (And they still are today in other countries with unlettered populations.) Although Yefimov was initially a passionate supporter of Stalin’s rival, Leon Trotsky, the cartoonist survived Trotsky’s fall from grace, saith The Week (October 17). And after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Yefimov was the leading cartoonist of “the Great Patriotic War. ... One Yefimov effort depicted wounded and retreating Wehrmacht soldiers carrying a coffin marked ‘Myth of the Invincibility of the German Army.’ Another showed a shrunken Hitler as a barrel-organ grinder. Yefimov’s lampoons so infuriated the Fuhrer that he vowed to shoot the cartoonist when he captured Moscow. But Yefimov was undaunted: he’d rather confront an angry Hitler, he told friends, than a disappointed Stalin.” After Stalin’s death in 1953, Yefimov wasn’t quite as influential, but “he became something of a national treasure, regaling visitors for decades with his memories of his Soviet masters.”