Victor Ivanoff

[1] Victor attended a Cossack military school and proved to be skilled at singing, and drawing under the guidance of General Nikolai Karpon.

After the October Revolution of 1917 when Bolsheviks came to power, the Ivanon family was opposing the regime and fled to Yugoslavia in 1920 where Victor enrolled to study architecture at the University of Zagreb.

His studies were abandoned and he joined General Platon Don Cossack Choir on their tour which included visiting South Africa in 1936.

Dr Willem van Heerden, editor of Die Vaderland, remembered that Ivanon brought him with two cartoons and several drawings, one of which "showed Stalin as a monster on a heap of skulls, with vultures on the lookout in the sky.

It was a picture of abhorrence, without the alleviating humour that later became such a distinctive feature of his cartoons…" [2] Joel Mervis recounts that Ivanon was recruited from Moçambique by the Rand Daily Mail, but because of his poor English was misdirected to Die Vaderland and was promptly snapped up.