Moscow ? Boris Yefimov remembers his telephone call from Josef Stalin as if it were yesterday the dictator’s stern tone, the quick beating of his own heart.

Yefimov, the Soviet Union’s most celebrated political cartoonist, had a front seat on the roller-coaster of the 20th century. No wonder he plans to thank God when he opens his eyes on his 102nd birthday today.

At a news conference Friday, the spry, diminutive Yefimov gleefully recounted how he fought the Nazis with laughter and fired irony at the Americans during the Cold War. He paid tribute to the memory of his brother, journalist Mikhail Koltsov, who was shot by a firing squad during Stalin’s Terror. And he lamented the death of his art in an increasingly chaotic world, where enemies are harder to define and thus harder to mock.

Peppering his stories with a poem and a song performed in his booming voice, Yefimov made it clear that after more than a century he was still enchanted by the business of living.

A Jew and a supporter of Stalin’s enemy Leon Trotsky, Yefimov might have shared his brother’s fate were it not for Stalin’s appreciation of his art. Millions of people died during Stalin’s rule, by execution or during brutal imprisonment. Stalin’s security forces ruthlessly arrested people suspected of political disloyalty, espionage or failure to work hard enough in factories or on farms or to fight hard enough against the German invaders.

Yefimov’s first encounter with Stalin came in 1937, at the height of the purges. One Friday, he recalled a late-night call from his editor, Lev Mekhlis, at Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party.

Mekhlis asked him to come into the office for a message “from him.”

“There was no need to say which ‘he,”‘ Yefimov recalled. “There was only one ‘he’ with a capital ‘H.”‘

At a meeting the next day, Mekhlis conveyed Stalin’s concern.

“He noticed that when you draw Japanese samurai, you always draw them with big teeth sticking out,” Yefimov quoted Mekhlis as saying. “Well, he said you shouldn’t do that because it insults the dignity of every Japanese person.”

“I said, ‘OK, no more teeth.”‘

Ten years later, the phone rang again. This time it was the Communist Party’s Central Committee, instructing him to come in to see Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov.

Zhdanov described a cartoon Stalin wanted as one of the first strikes in the Cold War. In Stalin’s vision, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower arrives at the North Pole with an army. An ordinary American asks, “What’s going on, general? Why such military activity in such a peaceful place?” Eisenhower answers, “Can’t you see the Russian threat is looming here?”

The following afternoon, as Yefimov was working on the assignment, he got another call.

It was Stalin himself, wanting to make sure that Eisenhower was depicted “armed to the teeth.”