Originally an anarchist, he joined the Bolsheviks five months after arriving in Petrograd in January 1919 and later worked for the Comintern as a journalist, editor and translator.

"[2] In his studies of Serge, Richard Greeman described him as a Modernist writer influenced by James Joyce, Andrei Bely and Freud; Greeman also believed that Serge, although writing in French, continued the experiments of such Russian Soviet writers as Isaac Babel, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pilnyak, and poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Yesenin.

Among his novels chronicling the lives of Soviet people and revolutionaries and of the first half of the 20th century, the best-known is The Case of Comrade Tulayev (French: L'affaire Toulaev).

"[5] Serge was arrested in 1928, shortly after Leon Trotsky, with whom he had sometimes associated, and confined to Leningrad until 1933, a time in which his second wife Liouba Roussakov began to suffer from mental illness.

Upon the German invasion of France in 1941, Serge decided to leave Europe, seeking passage to the United States, where he could not obtain a visa.