A serving police officer who turned his position of state authority against the state itself, he carried out one of the most politically significant assassinations of the Punjab insurgency era. His attack on a sitting chief minister — executed as a suicide bombing — marked a dramatic escalation in a conflict already defined by violence on multiple sides. The institutional betrayal at the heart of his story distinguishes him from other actors in that period.

Operating in the Soviet city of Kuybyshev during the 1960s, Serebryakov carried out a series of killings marked by extreme violence against nine victims, with three others surviving serious injury. His crimes remained largely obscured within the Soviet system, which was notoriously reluctant to acknowledge the existence of serial murder on its soil — a suppression that shaped both how such cases were investigated and how little reached public record. The epithet he acquired reflects the lasting impression his particular brutality left on the region.