Leopold Averbakh

Leopold Averbakh
L. L. Averbakh on the Ogoniok magazine
General Secretary of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers
In office
January 1925  April 1932
Preceded byposition established
Succeeded byposition abolished
Personal details
Born(1903-03-08)March 8, 1903
Saratov, Russian Empire
DiedAugust 14, 1937(1937-08-14) (aged 34)
Moscow, Soviet Union
Political partyAll-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)
RelativesYakov Sverdlov (uncle)
Zinovy Peshkov (uncle)
Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich (father-in-law)
Genrikh Yagoda (brother-in-law)

Leopold Leonidovich Averbakh (Russian: Леопо́льд Леони́дович Аверба́х; 8 March 1903 – 14 August 1937) was a Soviet literary critic, who was the head of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) in the 1920s and the most prominent member of a group of communist literary critics who argued that the Bolshevik Revolution, carried out in 1917 in the name of Russia's industrial working class, should be followed by a cultural revolution, in which bourgeois literature would be supplanted by literature written by and for the proletariat. Averbakh was a powerful figure in Russian cultural circles until Joseph Stalin ordered RAPP to cease its activities in 1932.