He left the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute after a political scandal and moved to Switzerland, where he became a student of the Swiss sculptor Adolf Meyer.

Merkurov returned to the Russian Empire in 1907 as he was called by the Armenian Apostolic Church authorities to execute a post-mortem mask of Catholicos Mkrtich Khrimian.

He was a member of the "United Workers' Brotherhood", the Association of Painters of Revolutionary Russia and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

As director of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, he saved the monument of Catherine the Great and secretly sent it to Yerevan, where it was hidden for decades and finally returned to Russia in 2006.

[7] For Joseph Stalin's 70th birthday, Merkurov made a special gift, a costly granite monument called "Death of the Leader".