In childhood, she shared her surname with her mother, Bronislava Sigismundowna Krasutskaya (Красуцкая), a graduate of the Warsaw academy, who spoke six languages and who was disowned by her father, a Polish tobacco manufacturer, because of her revolutionary activities.

[1] Serebryakova's father was Iosif Moiseyevich Byk-Bek [uk],[2][circular reference] a member of the Jewish Bund and medical student at Warsaw University.

Both her parents supported the Bolshevik Revolution, and served with the Red Army Russian Civil War, including its final stage, the capture of the Crimea, where their 16-year-old daughter was appointed a commissioner for culture.

[3] Her husband, and her father both signed The Declaration of the 46 in 1923, and supported Leon Trotsky in the factional struggle that tore apart the Communist Party of the Soviet Union after the death of Vladimir Lenin.

In the 1920s she began her career as an opera singer: in 1928 she sang at a big radio concert in London, received an invitation to the Bolshoi Theatre troupe.

The journalist Malcolm Muggeridge described meeting her at the country home of Beatrice Webb: Mme Sokolnikova was livelier altogether than her spouse; a large ebullient woman, dark and hairy, who, had she been English, might well have espoused the cause of family planning, and perhaps married a clergyman.

If American, I see her more as a popular novelist in the style of Mrs Parkinson Keyes; or maybe an anthropologist exploring the sexual ways of Papuans in the manner of Margaret Mead.

Serebryakova's convictions were overturned after Nikita Khrushchev had denounced Stalin's crimes at the 20th party congress in 1956, and she was able to return to Moscow and resume work on her life of Marx.

On 17 December 1962, she participated in a meeting of 400 representatives of the arts, in the presence of Khrushchev and other party leaders, and launched an attack on the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, who was leading the campaign for more liberalisation, accusing him of having acted as 'Stalin's mouthpiece', and suggested that he had caused the deaths of members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in 1948–52.

"[14] According to her daughter, Geliana, in the last five years of her life Serebryakova was "offended by the Writers' Union, for spreading rumors and gossip" and suffered physically and mentally as a result.