About the attempted coup in the USSR and the war of the Ministry of Internal Affairs against the KGB in 1982, they started talking recently. The plot of this plot is as follows: the Minister of Internal Affairs Nikolay Shchelokov on September 10 came to the reception to L. I. Brezhnev and, having convinced him of the reality of the attempts of the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, to seize power in the country, he received permission to arrest the chief security officer for three days to "clarify the circumstances of the anti-party conspiracy."
Three special-purpose detachments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs were immediately ordered to go to the Central Committee building, to Andropov's house and to the KGB building on Lubyanka.
But one of the commandos turned out to be a traitor and relayed a message about what was happening to the KGB. KGB officers were able to resist Shchelokov. They managed to blockade the detachments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs with superior forces. At Andropov's house on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, as a result of a quick firefight, his men overpowered Shchelokov's people. Fortunately, the police quickly surrendered, but one of them, the wounded Lieutenant Colonel R., died at the Sklifosovsky Institute on the evening of September 11. So the KGB suppressed the police putsch and outplayed the Ministry of Internal Affairs in just three and a half hours, and since then Andropov has gained undivided control over the decrepit body, mind and will of Secretary General Brezhnev.
When Brezhnev died a couple of months later, Andropov and his people received direct power. Shchelokov was soon dismissed, and his first deputy, Y. Churbanov, was convicted in the "Uzbek case." Then Shchelokov was stripped of the rank of general of the army and on the day of the police announced this in the newspapers, then he was expelled from the CPSU and deprived of the title of Hero of Socialist Labor and other post-war awards. A day later, on December 13, 1984, Shchelokov shot himself with a hunting rifle.
So this story was told seven years ago by the journalist Yevgeny Dodolev, who was told about the attempted coup (or rather, the “counter-coup”) by the writer Yulian Semyonov, who personally had many conversations with Igor Yuryevich Andropov. Dodolev claims that allegedly the head of the KGB, Vladimir Kryuchkov, confirmed in 1990 that Semyonov's stories about 1982 were not fiction. Moreover, Dodolev calls Shchelokov's suicide a staging: in fact, the Chekists allegedly forced the general of the army to kill themselves under the threat of organizing a trial of his entire family and confiscating all their property acquired by corrupt methods.
True, if there are a lot of doubtful moments in the stories. First, if Andropov later convinced the secretary general of his innocence, then why was Shchelokov not arrested after the failure, and if not convinced, then how did Brezhnev allow Andropov, who was sentenced to arrest by him, to walk free? Second, the details of this story vary from one account to another. So, in the publication of "Komsomolskaya Pravda" (09/13/12), Dodolev wrote that the KGB learned everything not thanks to the betrayal of one of Shchelokov's people, but "burning" them near Andropov's house the day before (although betrayal appears here). In addition, in this version, the special forces of the Ministry of Internal Affairs did not show any resistance.
In addition to these and other questions, apart from the stories of Semyonov and Dodolev, there is no evidence in favor of the reliability of their information about the conspiracy of July 10, 1982. And Semyonov himself can no longer tell about this without intermediaries, and did not have time to write, which only deepens doubts about that Dodolev is telling a fictitious story - after all, the dead person to whom he refers can no longer refute him.
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Dodolev himself once made a reservation according to Freud: "I am a very biased chronicler …". In his professional career, there were ducks, and bills, etc. It is likely that he only adapted the conspiracy theories of Shchelokov's career for a real, long-known and completely prosaic story: In 1968, N. Shchelokov became Minister of the Interior. Yuri Andropov had headed the KGB a year earlier. Long-standing rival structures continued to fight among themselves and under new leaders, and each followed the other.
The problem for Shchelokov was that there was plenty of compromising evidence on him - he was involved in many corruption cases, as he used his power and impunity for many years. But all this lasted until his main defender, Brezhnev, died. After that, nothing prevented Andropov, who was striving for power, to eliminate a competitor on very real grounds, that's all.
In addition, under Shchelokov, the Ministry of Internal Affairs became more than ever before a gathering of werewolves in uniform. Several of these "werewolves", being drunk, killed KGB Major Afanasyev because of the food he was carrying right in the Moscow metro in 1980. An investigation initiated by the KGB revealed many more violations and abuses that became systematic in the police under Shchelokov. If the ex-minister had not shot himself, he would have been convicted on a fully legal basis.