Boris Yefimov was the man who drew cartoons for Josef Stalin – and lived to tell the tale.

The artist died this week, a few days after celebrating his 108th birthday and he is being hailed as a truth-teller with an eye for the hidden weaknesses of world leaders. “You always honestly and steadfastly defended the interests of our country and its citizens,” said President Medvedev in a telegram congratulating him on his birthday.

Yefimov was more cynical about his profession. “You did what you were told if you wanted to save your neck,” he said in one of several interviews he gave in his last years in his home in Moscow. “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.”

The result can be seen in the cartoon he drew on Stalin’s personal orders. In 1947, Yefimov had been drawing caricatures long enough to have earned his spurs. He spent the Second World War lampooning the Nazis, accompanying the reporter Vasily Grossman to the front and later sketching the remnants of the Third Reich leadership in the dock at the Nuremburg trials.

Then, in the middle of a public lecture, he found himself being frogmarched out of the hall to meet Stalin’s commissar for culture, Andrei Zhdanov.

“Comrade Stalin sees the cartoon something like this,” Zhdanov told the nervous artist: General Dwight D. Eisenhower leads the US Army to the North Pole, looking for a war. A GI asks him why they should fight in such a peaceful spot and the general answers: “Can’t you see that the Russians are threatening us?” It was the beginning of the Cold War and, astonishingly, the Russian depiction of the warmongering West has not changed that much.

Yefimov worked all night, drawing peaceful-looking Eskimos around an igloo, a child eating ice cream – the very model of a peaceful world, about to be disrupted by the US. The next afternoon Stalin rang and demanded the picture by six in the evening. Two days later Yefimov was called in. He was quaking in his shoes. The likelihood of displeasing Stalin was high: he had been friends with the archenemy Leon Trotsky, his father was Jewish and his brother, the editor of Ogonyok magazine, had been killed after falling foul of Stalin.

But the cartoon was approved. Stalin had scrawled the title in red crayon, Eisenhower to the Defence. He even failed to spot that Yefimov, in the rush to meet the deadline, had mistakenly put penguins at the North Pole.

To live in Russia for the whole of the 20th century was to be a witness to extraordinary upheavals: as an 11-year-old Yefimov saw the Tsar pass by in a carriage; he lived through civil war, the world wars, the purges. He told the Los Angeles Times that his longevity was part of some divine pact: his brother had been killed at the age of 40 and he, Boris Yefimov, had been granted those extra years. But there was less poetic explanation. Stalin liked cartoons. They made him laugh.

“Yes, he destroyed my brother, he was a villain, he murdered many innocent people. A dreadful man! . . . He is also the person who granted me my life, my freedom, my work.”

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