On May 10, 1945, the day after Victory in Europe Day, one of Joseph Stalin’s most trusted men collapsed and died inside the Kremlin. Alexander Shcherbakov, the head of Soviet propaganda and the architect of Stalin’s information empire, suffered a massive heart attack at just 43 years old. Nikita Khrushchev later revealed the real story behind his death. Shcherbakov drank himself to death, not because he wanted alcohol, but because Stalin took pleasure in watching the men around him drink themselves under the table.
Shcherbakov was born in 1901 to a railway worker’s family. After his father died in 1907, his mother moved with six-year-old Alexander to the town of Rybinsk. By age ten, he was working in a factory, and by twelve he was an apprentice in a print shop. But Shcherbakov was different from other factory boys: intelligent, ambitious, and hungry for power.
At sixteen, he joined the Red Guards during the Russian Revolution. At seventeen, he joined the Communist Party. While other young Bolsheviks fought on battlefields, Shcherbakov studied, earning multiple university degrees and making himself indispensable in a Soviet Union desperate for educated officials. In 1924, he met Andrei Zhdanov, one of Stalin’s most powerful enforcers, who brought him into the dictator’s inner circle.
By 1934, at age 33, Shcherbakov was appointed first secretary of the Soviet Writers’ Union, giving him control over every writer, book, and poem published in the country. The poet Korney Chukovsky described him harshly: “In terms of cultural level, he was a senior janitor. He shouted obscenities at me in the Kremlin. Both my sons were fighting at the front while Shcherbakov’s son was safe at home.
” Others saw him differently, calling him noble and a spiritual aristocrat. Khrushchev, however, called him a poisonous snake and one of the most contemptible characters around Stalin. In 1936, Stalin launched the Great Purge. Over the next two years, millions were arrested and hundreds of thousands were executed.
Historians described Shcherbakov as a mobile purger: Stalin sent him to provinces where local officials were not arresting and executing people fast enough. In Ivanovo, he purged the entire regional party leadership. In Gorky, he oversaw mass arrests of factory managers and engineers. In Yaroslavl, he signed execution lists himself.
When he returned to Moscow, Stalin promoted him. In 1938, at age 37, Shcherbakov was appointed first secretary of Moscow, making him responsible for the capital and surrounding regions. Stalin told the Central Committee, “We need younger people who could replace the old guard. ” Shcherbakov was being groomed as a possible successor.
On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The Red Army collapsed, and within three months German forces reached the outskirts of Moscow. Two days after the invasion, Stalin appointed Shcherbakov director of the Soviet Information Bureau. Every newspaper, radio broadcast, and newsreel passed through his hands first.
His first task was to hide catastrophic defeats. The encirclement and capture of 600,000 Soviet soldiers at Kiev was reported as fierce battles with heavy German losses. The fall of Minsk, Smolensk, and most of Ukraine was described as strategic withdrawals to prepared positions. Shcherbakov rewrote reality every single day.
He was also made head of the Red Army’s political directorate, appointing political officers to every unit to monitor soldiers’ loyalty, report suspected traitors, and enforce Stalin’s orders. He sent writers like Vasily Grossman, Konstantin Simonov, and Ilya Ehrenburg to the front lines. They reported directly to him, and he told them what to write, what to emphasize, and what to never mention. When the Battle of Stalingrad began in August 1942, Shcherbakov saw an opportunity.
He sent reporters into the burning city and ordered them to find heroes and create legends. Historian Antony Beevor noted that detailed reports were sent daily from the Stalingrad front to Shcherbakov, who transformed the brutal horror of the battle into the greatest propaganda victory of the war. “Not a step back” became the rallying cry across the entire Soviet Union. Shcherbakov even weaponized the Russian Orthodox Church.
In 1943, Stalin allowed churches to reopen for the first time since the revolution. Shcherbakov supervised the effort personally, ensuring priests preached loyalty to Stalin and hatred of Germans. Those who worked with him described a man of great capacity for work and an outstanding memory. He worked 18-hour days and controlled information across 11 time zones.
But Alexander Solzhenitsyn learned from Shcherbakov’s chauffeur that the obese official hated being seen. Hallways were cleared before he arrived, and he would check for dust under carpets while grunting because of his weight. By 1943, Shcherbakov was grotesquely overweight, over 300 pounds, moving with difficulty and breathing heavily. He also drank every night.
In the evenings, Stalin’s inner circle gathered at his dachas outside Moscow. Dinners started at nine or ten at night and lasted until four or five in the morning. Stalin forced everyone to drink shot after shot, hour after hour. Khrushchev recalled, “Time came when you couldn’t refuse.
They’d simply force it on you, pump you full, fill you to the brim deliberately. ” Only one person was not drinking: Stalin himself. His personal physician had warned him about heart disease, high blood pressure, and arteriosclerosis, so Stalin had stopped drinking. But he never told anyone.
While he held a glass of wine and sipped mostly water, he watched his subordinates destroy themselves. Historian Mark Shroud explained that Stalin used alcohol to keep his inner circle off balance. Drunk men revealed their true thoughts, made mistakes, and showed fear. Refusing to drink meant you had something to hide, so they drank.
Lavrentiy Beria, head of the secret police, understood the game. He would place rotten tomatoes on Khrushchev’s chair before dinner. When Khrushchev sat down, Stalin would throw tomatoes at people while the room erupted in laughter. Sometimes Stalin made the middle-aged, drunk men dance like performing monkeys while he watched.
One observer noted, “People were literally becoming drunkards, and the more a person became a drunkard, the more pleasure Stalin got from it. ” Shcherbakov suffered worst of all. Already overweight, the alcohol made his condition catastrophic. His weight climbed from 300 pounds to 350 and beyond.
His face bloated, his breathing labored, and his heart struggled under the strain. But he could not stop because refusing meant disloyalty, and disloyalty meant death. Khrushchev was clear: Shcherbakov drank himself to death not because he craved alcohol but because it pleased Stalin. Everyone in Stalin’s circle watched Shcherbakov deteriorate and understood what they were seeing.
Andrei Zhdanov suffered the same fate, another trusted man forced to drink himself to death, dying at 52 in 1948. Refusing Stalin meant execution. Obeying Stalin meant slow death. On May 9, 1945, victory in Europe was declared.
Moscow erupted in celebration as millions took to the streets. Shcherbakov had done everything Stalin asked: controlled Soviet information throughout the war, created the propaganda that sustained morale, and appointed political officers to every Red Army unit. The next day, May 10, 1945, he suffered a massive heart attack in his Kremlin office and died within hours. Officially, the cause was heart failure.
In reality, it was years of obesity, stress, and forced drinking. Stalin ordered a state funeral, and Shcherbakov was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis with full honors. The town of Rybinsk, where young Alexander had worked in a print shop, was renamed Shcherbakov. But Stalin was not done with him.
Eight years later, on January 13, 1953, the Soviet news agency TASS announced that Shcherbakov had not died of natural causes in 1945. He had been murdered. A group of doctors, most of them Jewish, had allegedly poisoned him. This became known as the Doctors’ Plot.
Nine doctors were arrested and tortured until they confessed to crimes they never committed. Stalin claimed they had murdered Shcherbakov and Zhdanov on orders from American and British intelligence. The massive conspiracy to kill Soviet leaders was completely fabricated. Stalin planned to use it to launch a purge of Soviet Jews, possibly including deportation or extermination.
Railroad cars were prepared and lists were compiled. Then, on March 1, 1953, Stalin suffered a massive stroke at his dacha. His guards found him lying on the floor in his own urine, unconscious. Four days later, on March 5, 1953, he died.
The Doctors’ Plot was immediately exposed as fraud, the doctors were released, and Shcherbakov’s name was quietly removed from the fabricated murder charges. In 1957, Rybinsk restored its original name. Shcherbakov’s monuments came down.
Today, few remember Alexander Shcherbakov, but his story reveals the true face of Stalin’s rule: even the man who earned Stalin’s absolute trust was forced to destroy himself, and then his corpse was used to justify one final act of mass murder.