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.

"[3] This meant that he ran the union, while the writer Maxim Gorky held the honorary position of chairman.

[2] Late in 1938, he became First Secretary of the Moscow Regional Party Committee in 1938, a post he held until his death.

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."

"[7] Nikita Khrushchev, who had a very negative attitude towards him and considered Shcherbakov to be "a poisonous snake" and "one of the most contemptible characters around Stalin" wrote that "Shcherbakov ended up drinking himself to death – and he drank not so much because he had a craving for alcohol, but simply because it pleased Stalin when people around him drank themselves under the table.

"[8] According to historian Natalia Borisova “he (Shcherbakov) enjoyed enormous authority in Moscow.