The tension Mr. Yefimov felt was at least as intense. In 1940, for political reasons, Stalin ordered the execution of Mr. Yefimov’s brother, Mikhail Koltsov, a leading Soviet journalist who had been the model for the character Karkov in Hemingway’s novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” His brother’s death was very much in Boris Yefimov’s mind when Stalin summoned him to hear his idea for a cartoon.

Mr. Yefimov told Stalin it was a great idea. The cartoonist did not know whether to rush to finish it quickly, or take more time to show how important he considered the project. He proceeded methodically, until Stalin called him at 3:30 the next afternoon. He wanted the cartoon by 6.

In an interview with Russian Life in 1999, Mr. Yefimov said, “A cold shiver went down my spine.”

Mr. Yefimov finished on time. For many years, the original cartoon, with Stalin’s personal editing marks in red pencil, hung on his wall.

Mr. Yefimov was born as Boris Fridland in Kiev on Sept. 28, 1899, the second son of a Jewish shoemaker. Within three years, his family moved to Bialystok, which is now part of Poland. It was there that he began to draw, when he was 5, and saw Czar Nicholas II, when he was 11. He studied art and then law before going to Moscow to escape the chaos of the civil war in Ukraine.

In the 1920s, he and his brother changed their last name, Fridland, partly because it sounded Jewish at a time when anti-Semitism was on the rise. He got a job at Izvestia through his brother’s connections.

Image A 1941 cartoon mocked the fall of the invincible German Army. Credit... Itar-Tass, via Associated Press

Throughout his life, Mr. Yefimov was at the center of his country’s cultural elite. He and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky became friends, despite Mr. Mayakovsky’s remark upon first seeing Mr. Yefimov’s drawings.