Institute of Red Professors
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.