Stalin's favorite cartoonist

Christie Davies:

It would be easy but unfair to condemn Efimov for placing his considerable talents in the services of Stalin, a monster as evil as Hitler or Lenin or Mao. However, in his Red Files interview Efimov said:

What happened during those (Stalin) years in any newspaper, any magazine, any home of any conviction – people disappeared. You would arrive in the morning and ask,
"Where is Yuri?"

Well, they had taken him away in the night. You could not discuss it any further… When they arrested my brother, the editor of the newspaper Pravda, I realized what was going on and I prepared myself for my own arrest… But then something strange and inexplicable happened. At the same time that my brother's case ended and he was executed, I was asked to go back to work… I could out of principle have said:
"No you killed my brother, I am not going to work".

But they would have sent me to the same place. I did not have the right to do that, because you can direct your own fate, your freedom, your own life, but I had my parents, our parents. I had a wife. I had a young son. If I had done that, they would all have died.

What would most of us have done faced with that kind of dilemma? We would have felt like Efimov that we had no choice. It is all very well for those like Sartre to say that we always have a choice; it isn't like that, as many of the victims of the Sartre approved épuration knew. Besides, Sartre chose evil and gained fame, a Faustian pact if ever there was one. I do not propose to criticize Efimov in any way. He was in a box in the First Circle of the Soviet Theatre of Hell. He was not in any sense a devil like Sartre or Christopher Hill.