Shcherbakov, Aleksandr

Born Sept. 27 (Oct. 10), 1901, in the city of Ruza, in what is now Moscow Oblast; died May 10, 1945, in Moscow. Soviet state and party figure. Colonel general (1943). Member of the Communist Party from 1918.

The son of a worker, Shcherbakov became a worker himself in 1912. He engaged in Komsomol work between 1918 and 1922 and was a delegate to the Third and Fourth Congresses of the Russian Communist League of Youth. He studied at the Ia. M. Sverdlov Communist University from 1921 to 1924 and the Institute of the Red Professors from 1930 to 1932.

Shcherbakov worked in the apparatus of the Central Committee of the ACP(B) from 1932 to 1936. In 1934 he became first secretary of the Writers’ Union of the USSR. Between 1936 and 1938 he was secretary of the Leningrad and Irkutsk oblast committees of the ACP(B) and secretary of the Donetsk oblast committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine. Between 1938 and 1945 he held the position of first secretary of the Moscow oblast committee and of the Moscow city committee of the ACP(B). In 1941, Shcherbakov was named a secretary of the Central Committee of the ACP(B). In addition, in 1942 he became chief of the Main Political Directorate of the Soviet Army, head of the Soviet Information Bureau, and deputy people’s commissar of defense.

A delegate to the Sixteenth through Eighteenth Congresses of the ACP(B), Shcherbakov was elected a member of the Central Committee at the Eighteenth Congress. He was a deputy to the first convocation of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Shcherbakov, who was awarded three Orders of Lenin, three other orders, and various medals, is buried on Red Square at the Kremlin Wall.