Shcherbakov was born into a working-class family in
Ruza, near Moscow. The family moved to
Rybinsk after his father's death in 1907. After primary school, he was sent to work as an apprentice, at the age of 12, in a Rybinsk print works. He was sent to work in a factory at the age of 10. He joined the
Red Guards in 1917, and joined the
Communist Party in 1918. He worked for
Komsomol in Rybinsk during the
Russian Civil War. In 1921–24, he studied at Sverdlov University, Moscow. In 1924, he started work as a party official in
Nizhny Novgorod, where he gained the trust of the provincial party boss,
Andrei Zhdanov. In 1930–32, he studied at the
Institute of Red Professors. In 1932, he was transferred to party headquarters in Moscow. In 1934, after Zhdanov had moved to Moscow to take charge of the party's cultural policies, Shcherbakov was appointed head of the Cultural-Education department of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and, after the
first Soviet Writers' Congress, in August 1934, he was appointed First Secretary of the
Union of Soviet Writers, although he "was not a writer but a full-time party
apparatchik, and had not even been a Congress delegate." This meant that he ran the union, while the writer
Maxim Gorky held the honorary position of chairman. Following the latter's death in 1936, Shcherbakov was transferred back to full time party work as Second Secretary of the Leningrad Regional Party Committee, under Zhdanov. During the
Great Purge, he served "as a mobile purger to various reluctant provinces." In 1937–38, he was First Secretary of the East Siberian regional party, based in
Irkutsk. For part of 1938, he was First Secretary in the
Donetsk region of Ukraine. During the
German-Soviet War, Shcherbakov served as the head of the political directorate of the
Red Army (with the rank of
colonel general) in
Moscow, and at the same time was director of the
Soviet Information Bureau. According to Antony Beevor's book,
Stalingrad, The Fateful Siege: 1942–1943, "One of the richest sources in the Russian Ministry of Defence central archive at Podolsk consists of the very detailed reports sent daily from the Stalingrad Front to Aleksandr Shcherbakov." After the Comintern was officially dissolved on 15 May 1943, its organizational framework continued as the
International Department, with Aleksandr Shcherbakov serving as the International Department’s formal head from 1943 to 1945, with
Georgy Dimitrov and
Dmitry Manuilsky assigned as his deputies. Shcherbakov died of
heart failure on 10 May 1945, right after
Victory Day, and the following year the town of
Rybinsk was renamed
Shcherbakov in his honour (its original name was restored in 1957). In January 1953,
TASS announced that he had been murdered, a victim of the
Doctors' plot. This story was discredited later that same year, after
Stalin's death. == Personality ==