Born at Samara, the son of a metalworker, Serebryakov left school at 14 to operate a lathe in an engineering works in Lugansk.

In 1919, he became a member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, together with Nikolai Krestinsky and Yevgeny Preobrazhensky.

At the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, Lenin's faction won a decisive victory on the dispute,[3] and Serebryakov and the other two secretaries of the Central Committee had to resign.

According to his daughter, Serebryakov looked up to Trotsky as a "great authority", who treated him with "not only respect, reverence, but also some kind of warmth and love, purely human.

"[5] He was removed from his government post in 1924, and sent to Vienna, on a mission to negotiate a peace treaty between the Soviet Union and Romania.

Victor Serge, who covered the talks as a journalist, described Serebryakov as "marked out by his moral authority, talents and past..., plump, vigorous in manner, fair-haired, with a full, round face and aggressive little moustache.

He was expelled from the Communist Party in August 1927, as one of a group who had been running an underground printing press, and was exiled to Semipalatinsk.

For a long time, Galina blamed the activities of both her two ex-husbands, Serebryakov and Sokolnikov, for her arrest in 1937, and her years of exile and imprisonment.