During World War I, he served as an officer in the Imperial Russian Army, but embraced Bolshevik ideology around the time of the October Revolution; he was strongly opposed to Greater Romania, and, after the Romanian–Bessarabian unification, made his way into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was a cradle for Moldovenism and the MASSR.

Working alongside Samuil Lehtțir, Milev helped establish the MASSR's cultural institutions, and served as president of the Moldavian Union of Writers.

His short prose was a contribution to Soviet propaganda, focusing mainly on depicting the Romanian Kingdom as a bourgeois or fascist polity, which terrorized its "Moldavian" peasants and the Bessarabian Jews.

[8] Historian Charles King suggests that Milev followed propagandist Vladimir Dembo in describing the "emancipatory power of the Bolshevik Revolution" for the Moldavians as a separate people, with full liberation only attainable once Bessarabia had been Sovietized.

[13] As noted by Ocinschi, he was a political figure of importance in the Moldavian section of the Ukrainian Communist (Bolshevik) Party, and personally involved in the land collectivization campaign, including as a collector of grain.

[16] As summarized by scholar Petru Negură, it showed Bessarabia as overwhelmed by the Gendarmerie, in service to the prosperous and exploitative bourgeois class who "would do anything to get rid of the peasants".

Printed in Tiraspol in 1930, it was celebrated by his colleague Lehtțir as "precious for our literature, but also from a historical point of view", in that it "recall[s] those blood-stained days of the Romanian boyars in Bessarabia.

"[3] Smochină rated the sketches as "below mediocrity", though noting that humorous fragments, such as Stănescu and Eu gioc în cărți ("I Play Them Cards"), show more stylistic vigor in their depiction of petty corruption.

In 1933, he and D. Grigorieva co-authored a primer for adult education (Abecedar: Pentru școala de vîrstnici), which placed emphasis on the terms-of-art in industrial life, as well as on the ideological tropes of Marxism-Leninism.

Soviet historiography now viewed Milev's killing, as well as those of other MASSR writers, as embarrassing, and records were falsified to show that he had died, at an unspecified location, on October 3, 1944.

[2] A reopening of the Milev dossier during de-Stalinization (in August 1956) included Ocinschi's description of him as a "very conscious" man, whose literary work had produced "healthy socialist content.

"[4] He was formally rehabilitated at that stage, along with other victims of the Purge—his new status, which saw his work included in primers and textbooks, allowed dissenting Moldavian authors, who had remarked that Latinization was no longer criminalized, to push for the full recognition of Romanian literature as part of the regional canon.

[31] A 1958 issue of Literaturnaya Gazeta featured critic Vasile Coroban's musings about the growth of Moldavian literature, listing Milev as a founding figure.

[32] Into the 1970s, Coroban continued to describe Milev and Ion Canna as the "sources of all Moldavian Soviet prose", but, as noted in 2019 by critic Cristina Antoni, his assessment failed to make the authors regain popularity: "The writers' total grounding in ideological themes [...], along with their schematism, their lack of imagination, their linguistic inability, drastically reduced any interest that readers of the sixties and seventies could have maintained for such narratives.

[37] In post-Soviet Moldova, he was formally commemorated, including by having his name inscribed on a votive cross in Chișinău, alongside Chioru, Lehtțir, Malai, and 29 other writers described as "massacred or deported by the diabolical communist-Stalinist regime.