Leopold Leonidovich Averbakh 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.
