Among other positions, he served as the editor of the newspaper Krasnoye Chernomorye, secretary of the journal Novy Mir, special correspondent for Izvestia, and director of the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow from 1945 to 1948.

He received the Stalin Prize (in 1949) for his literary accomplishments, and is considered a classic writer of Soviet Socialist Realist literature.

In 1904, Gladkov began propaganda work for the Social Revolutionary Party in Chita, Irkutsk, joining the teachers' institute of Tiflis in the following year.

In 1906 he began propaganda work for the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, and was exiled that November for four years to Manzurka village in Irkutsk province.

[5] Throughout his lifetime, Gladkov rewrote passages of Cement both to suit contemporary political concerns and to fit with the Socialist Realist aesthetic established in 1932.