[1] Vadim Rudnev studied medicine at Moscow University, but in 1902 was exiled to Siberia for his revolutionary activities.

At the outbreak of World War I, the SRs (like other revolutionary parties) split into 'Defencist' and 'Internationalist' antiwar groups; Rudnev, like his colleagues AA Argunov and ND Avksentiev, took the former position, in opposition to the party's leaders, Victor Chernov and Mark Natanson, and worked as a doctor on a hospital ship.

He opposed the October Revolution, and after the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly (of which he was a member) he fled south, first to Kiev, then the Caucasus, and finally Odessa.

Rudnev, like many Russian émigrés, moved to Paris, where along with his fellow SR Ilya Fondaminsky he founded Sovremennye zapiski [Contemporary Notes], which became the main literary journal of the Russian emigration (publishing, for instance, most of Nabokov's Russian-language work).

When the Germans captured Paris in World War II, he moved to the south of France, where he died of cancer in Pau.