Brezhnev's 16-year police chief who rebuilt the MVD into a modern force
In 1971, as the Politburo prepared to expel Solzhenitsyn, Shchelokov submitted a memo — 'On the Solzhenitsyn Question' — proposing to publish Cancer Ward and give him a Moscow apartment. It was rejected, but a serving interior minister going to bat for a dissident writer had no parallel in the Brezhnev era.
A Dnipropetrovsk comrade of Brezhnev, he served a record-breaking sixteen years as Soviet interior minister. He raised police salaries sharply, earmarked 10% of new housing for MVD personnel, and created a network of police academies topped by the USSR's first MVD Academy, elevating the despised militia into a professional state institution. He befriended Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya, petitioned the Politburo to save Solzhenitsyn from exile, and was the first senior official to order the search for Nicholas II's remains. During Andropov's succession purge he was stripped of every rank and decoration and shot himself.
Career Timeline
- 1938–39First Secretary, Krasnogvardeysky district committee, Dnipropetrovsk
- 1939–41Chairman, Dnipropetrovsk City Soviet — begins working under Brezhnev
- 1941–45Political commissar, Southern/North Caucasus Fronts; chief of political dept, 218th Div. & 28th Corps; ends war as colonel
- 1951–65First Deputy Chairman, Moldavian Council of Ministers → Chairman, Moldavian Sovnarkhoz
- 1965–66Second Secretary, CP Moldavia
- 1966–82Minister of Internal Affairs (Min. of Public Order until 1968) — 16 years, promoted to Army General
- 1982–84Transferred to Defence Ministry inspectorate → expelled from CC, stripped of rank & awards on corruption charges
Related historical events
Downfall: Corruption Investigation and Suicide
One month after Brezhnev's death in November 1982, Shchelokov was removed as interior minister and transferred to the Defence Ministry's inspectorate. Under the new MVD chief Vitaly Fedorchuk, a comprehensive audit uncovered staggering personal abuse. Antiques worth 248,000 rubles (seized as evidence in a currency-smuggling case) had been moved to Shchelokov's residence and papered over as 'MVD museum holdings.' Fresh flowers costing tens of thousands of rubles annually were delivered to friends' apartments and written off as wreaths laid at Lenin's Mausoleum and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Nine apartments housing relatives were disguised as 'special facilities,' billing 60,000 rubles in maintenance to the state. A duty-free import shop, ostensibly for operational personnel, was raided by his family to the tune of 50,000–70,000 rubles a year. A two-part documentary, Pages of a Life, chronicling his own career, was produced on the MVD budget for 50,000 rubles and shelved unseen.
Behind the investigation stood KGB chairman Yuri Andropov. Relations between the two agencies had ruptured irreparably after the December 1980 murder of KGB Major Vyacheslav Afanasyev at Zhdanovskaya metro station: drunken officers of the MVD, eyeing his expensive cognac and food, beat him to death when he threatened to report them. Andropov used the scandal as a lever against the MVD and, after Brezhnev's death, moved swiftly to settle accounts.
Shchelokov's wife Svetlana committed suicide in February 1983. He was expelled from the Central Committee that June, stripped of his Army General rank in November 1984, expelled from the Party on 7 December, and on 12 December stripped of all civilian decorations including his Hero of Socialist Labour title. He wrote to Konstantin Chernenko insisting he had 'never broken the law, never taken anything from the state,' and left a note reading, 'They don't take medals off a dead man.' On 13 December 1984, wearing his full-dress uniform with every medal pinned to it, he shot himself in the head with a hunting rifle from his collection at his dacha in Serebryany Bor.