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- Obituary: Boris Yefimov | World news | The Guardian
 Oct 5, 2008 10:22am  (2 reviews) politics http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct...- boris yefimov
illustrating the illustrious
The History Lesson (1941)
. . . Yefimov was born Boris Fridland, the second son of a Jewish shoemaker in Kiev, though the family moved west to Bialystok (now in Poland). Drawing was a hobby, and he intended to become a lawyer until the first world war and Bolshevik revolution of 1917 intervened. Caught up in the turmoil of revolutionary Kiev, which saw power change 12 times, he began to draw political cartoons to vent his frustration at the chaos. It was in Kiev that he witnessed the fiery oratory of Leon Trotsky, the creator of the Red Army.
Like his brother, Mikhail, he became a follower of the Bolshevik cause. When Mikhail moved to Moscow to work as a journalist, he encouraged his younger brother to join him and got him a job as an agitprop cartoonist working for Pravda, producing propaganda posters for the new regime. He changed his name to Yefimov to conceal his Jewish background.
He met Vladimir Illitch Lenin, but it was to Trotsky, then effectively Lenin's number two, that he was drawn. In 1924 his first book of caricatures was published, with a foreword by Trotsky, the man who was about to be excised from Soviet history and later murdered at Stalin's behest. Though the book's publisher was subsequently executed for his political mistakes, Yefimov survived. In the 1930s, the era of Stalin's great terror and the purges, he portrayed "enemies of the people", attended show trials in the Hall of Columns in Moscow and watched as many of his acquaintances and later his brother, then a prominent editor, were denounced and later shot by Stalin's secret police. . . .
The Fuhrer's Barrel-Organ (1942)
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