He was secretary of the Komsomol at Moscow State University and was active in the 1929–1930 campaign against the mathematician Dmitri Fyodorovich Egorov.
In 1933, he was dismissed from the Communist Party on charges of Trotskyism and exiled to Voronezh, but was rehabilitated two years later and returned to Moscow.
He was habilitated (Russian doctorate) in 1941 with Aleksandr Yakovlevich Khinchin at the Lomonosov University[1] and in 1950 became professor.
[3] He also worked on probability theory, for example in 1938 he proved an equivalent of the Cramér's theorem for the Poisson distribution.
He edited the Russian editions of Nicolas Bourbaki's "Topology and Integration Theory" and translated numerous other mathematical works from Italian, English and German, for example the lectures on the theory of algebraic numbers by Erich Hecke, the book Moderne Algebra by Bartel Leendert van der Waerden, the Problems and Theorems in Analysis by George Pólya and Gábor Szegő, the introduction to the theory of Fourier integrals by Edward Charles Titchmarsh, the lectures on partial differential equations by Francesco Tricomi, the introduction to differential and integral calculus by Edmund Landau, the monograph on divergent series by Godfrey Harold Hardy and the finite dimensional vector spaces by Paul Halmos.