User:Wizlon, Don/Leopold Averbakh
 | This is not a Wikipedia article: It is an individual user's work-in-progress page, and may be incomplete and/or unreliable. For guidance on developing this draft, see Wikipedia:So you made a userspace draft. Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Leopold Averbakh Leopold Leonidovich Averbakh (Russian: Леонид Леонидович Авербах; 1903-1937) was the founder of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, which - though not an official party organisation - virtually dictated communist policy towards the arts in the late 1920s until it was disbanded in 1932. Averbakh played a major role in hounding, among others, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who committed suicide, and the novelist, Yevgeny Zamyatin, who was driven into exile, fell form power very suddenly because Josif Stalin regarded him as undisciplined. Like so many prominent communists of the 1920s, he fell victims to the purges in the 1930s.
Early life Born into a Jewish family in Saratov, son of the owner of a small steamboat, he had exceptionally good family contacts in the Bolshevik party. His maternal uncle, Yakov Sverdlov, was briefly the third most senior figure in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, after Lenin and Trotsky. Another uncle was the adopted son of the writer, Maxim Gorky. His sister, Ida Averbakh, married Stalin's future chief of police, Genrikh Tagoda.
Political career Averbakh joined the communist youth movement, Komsomol, and the communist party in 1920. By 1923 was a leading figure within the All-Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (VAPP) which campaigned aggressively against the predominance in the published of non-communists with middle class or aristocratic backgrounds, such Anna Akhmatova or Alexis Tolstoy. In August 1923, he was one of three leaders of VAPP who signed agreement with Mayakovsky and his collaborator Osip Brik to work together to "steadfastly unmask the bourgeois gentry and pseudo-sympathetic literary groups and promulgate their own principles of class artistry." In September 1924,he attacked Mikhail Bulgakov, who would go on to be of Russia's greatest 20th century writers, as someone who "did not even pretend" to sympathise with communism.
In 1925, some of the older leaders of VAPP sided with the Leningrad party boss, Grigori Zinoviev, when he came out in opposition to Stalin. As a result, VAPP was disbanded, but Averbakh as General Secretary and undisputed leader of its successor, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP). Though still only in his early 20s, he was a hugely influential figure in cultural politics, and a shrewd political manipulator. The writer Victor Serge described him as having "the hairless head of the young senior official, the verbal fluency of a congress demagogue, and the dominating, false sincere eyes of a manipulator of meetings." In summer 1929, he orchestrated a campaign against Yevgeny Zamyatin over the publication abroad of his dystopian novel, We.