Sergei Leonidovich Rubinstein was born on June 18, 1889, in Odesa to a Jewish family of a prominent local lawyer.
From 1922 to 1930, he was the director of the Odesa Scientific Library, then he worked at the Herzen Leningrad State Pedagogical Institute (1930–1942).
From 1948 and up until somewhat after the death of Stalin, in the course of the anti-Semitic campaign in the Soviet Union, Rubinstein was persecuted and was criticised for having a "non-party" approach to science.
In 1956, Rubinstein was reappointed chairman of the Sector of Psychology at the Institute of Philosophy at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.
Unlike this intellectual movement and explicitly in contrast with behaviorism, Rubinstein always insisted on regarding activity as inseparable from consciousness, which is also in a clear opposition to Freudian tradition with its emphasis on the depths of the human psyche and unconscious psychological processes.