He was among the founding figures of genetics within the early days of the Soviet Union and held a high status within the communist party but when Soviet genetics entered a power struggle, he was targeted for his ideas in eugenics which led to the sidelining of his career although he was not executed like several other geneticists during the purges under Stalin.

His father Sergei Mitrofanovich had trained in art and was an architect in Kursk while his mother Yuliya Dmitriyevna was from Livny.

After Koltsov rose in position and founded the Institute of Experimental Biology in 1917, his patronage helped Serebrovsky to study poultry genetics from around 1918.

Serebrovsky also worked with S.G. Navashin at the Timiryazev Biological Institute where he helped develop a laboratory in 1929 where he developed the idea of "step-allelomorphism" (or "step-alleles", pseudo alleles that represent closely located loci on a chromosome that act as a single module.)

[1] In 1929 Serebrovsky wrote a book Anthropogenetics and Eugenics in a Socialist Society (Антропогенетика и евгеника в социалистическом обществе) in which he suggested that the use of artificial insemination with sperm obtained from carefully chosen men would help society under socialism unlike the negative eugenics that the western world considered.

Dubinin was keen to prevent the perversion of science by the "scum of ideas of Lotsy, DeVries, Morgan, Serebrovsky, Filipchencko, and others."

Serebrovsky clashed with Trofim Lysenko calling him mrakobes, an expletive meaning ("obscurantist") at meetings in 1935 and 1936.