Boris Yefimov survived 108 years because Joseph Stalin thought him useful. The logic of the Stalin years meant that he should certainly have been killed: Trotsky, whom Stalin had cast as the omnipresent and diabolical wrecker of Soviet communism, had prefaced a book of his early cartoons. Many thousands died for much less, or for nothing at all: Yefimov's own brother, Mikhail, was arrested in 1938 on his return from covering the Spanish civil war and executed in 1940 as an "enemy of the people". Later, Yefimov would feature such "enemies of the people" as grotesque villains in his cartoons.

Yefimov demonstrated a talent which fitted in to the propaganda that defined most of the output of the Soviet press. A largely self-taught cartoonist, with a facility in his caricatures for expressing the regime's intentions and for blasting its enemies, he was too good to waste. Working for the man who had murdered his brother called for a certain flexibility, a necessary component for those intellectuals and officials who survived his reign. His long life spanned tsarism, revolution, Stalinism, de-Stalinism, reform under Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet collapse and Russian revival. He lauded Trotsky and vilified him, drew the western allies as monsters then as friends, worshipped Stalin and turned on him, adored the Soviet Union and admired Gorbachev, who destroyed it. Through it all, he poured out the drawings, which were at their best when lampooning the Nazis - notably, one which had a cringing Hitler standing before a map of Moscow, being lectured by Napoleon; another which had an elongated and hideous Goebbels, under a motto claiming that "only Aryans are beautiful".

His Stalin period also illustrated how much the general secretary, himself an autodidact and once a talented poet, orchestrated the agitprop to which he had reduced Soviet art and letters. In 1947, he ordered Yefimov to do an anti-American cartoon, a sign he was breaking the uneasy alliance with the western powers which had held tenuously since the war. Finishing the brusquely demanded caricature just in time - death could have been the penalty for late delivery - he was summoned the next day to the Central Committee building to find that Stalin had personally rewritten the caption. Yefimov kept the cartoon, with Stalin's near indecipherable writing, on a wall in his flat. Long after the dictator's death, he said of him that "he was a villain, he murdered many people, a dreadful man. But still, a certain human logic wins out. He is also the person who guaranteed me my life, my freedom, my work".

His survival was the more remarkable because he was a Jew - a race against whom Stalin launched a murderous campaign a little before his death in 1953. He was born Boris Fridland in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, on September 28 1900, second son of a shoemaker: later, becoming aware of the anti-Semitism that surrounded him, he changed his name to the more Russian-sounding Yefimov.

Having survived the civil war and its privations, and with some classes in Kharkov's art school behind him, Yefimov moved to Moscow in 1922, where his brother, Mikhail, already a journalist, helped him find a job at Izvestiya. He was a success in his 20s and famous by his 30s. Much to his pleasure, Neville Chamberlain complained about him in a note to Stalin, and Hitler put him on a post-victory death list.

As the Soviet army prevailed over the Wehrmacht, Yefimov followed the soldiers - witnessing the battle for Warsaw (and realising that Stalin held back from taking the city earlier so that the Nazis would finish off the potentially dangerous Polish insurrectionists), then moving on to the liberated concentration camps at Majdanek and Treblinka, spectacles which gave an extra bitterness to his caricatures of the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials.

His companion on these journeys was the war correspondent Vasily Grossman - also Jewish and a survivor of a different kind. Grossman, a lauded journalist, drew from the horrors of war the lesson that it had been a struggle between two totalitarian systems - an insight at the core of his great novel, Life and Fate. Trying to have it published during the post-Stalin thaw, he was rebuffed and marginalised; he was not otherwise punished, but died believing it would never see the light of day.

Yefimov, by contrast, survived as part of the Soviet cultural elite, drawing lampoons of Churchill, whom he had once used his skill to praise, and of US President Truman, whom he represented as consorting with fascists. His cartoons are a record of the turns and shifts in Soviet policy; his success depended on an adherence to the line of the leadership, whatever that was.

In an interview on his 100th birthday, Yefimov said that "a truly artistic caricature conveys the character and the conduct of the person it depicts . . . a cartoon instantaneously gives you both the event and commentary about that event. That is the nature of a cartoon: fast, funny and persuasive".

He regretted - along with many Russians, including Prime Minister Vladimir Putin - the passing of the USSR. He looked back on his work as necessary, even useful: "propaganda", he noted, "was born with the Soviet regime in 1917, and through all the 70 years of its existence, propaganda helped to consolidate the society, held it in some kind of strong, unified community; and when the Soviet Union disappeared, there was a kind of emptiness". His regret was not surprising: the Jewish cobbler's son had occupied an honoured, if at first precarious, place at the top of Soviet society for over 70 years, receiving two Stalin prizes and, near the end of his life, the honorary title of Chief Artist of Izvestiya.

Married twice, with one son, he died a few days after his 108th birthday, on October 1.