He played a prominent role in the Bolshevik youth movement in his teens, and by the age of 19 he was editor of the literary journal Molodaya gvardiya ('Young Guard'), and a leading member of the All-Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (VAPP), the forerunner of RAPP.

He was one of three representatives of VAPP, who signed an agreement in 1923 with the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, promising that their respective organisations would co-operate to "steadfastly unmask bourgeois-gentry and pseudo-sympathetic literary groups" and to promote "class artistry".

Averbakh and most of VAPP's younger members broke with him and founded RAPP, as a kind of literary wing of the Stalinist faction, though they never sought or received Stalin's formal endorsement.

"[1]Averbakh's influence reached its peak in 1929, when he orchestrated public campaigns against the writers Yevgeny Zamyatin, who was driven into exile, and Boris Pilnyak, and the Old Bolshevik and critic, Aleksandr Voronsky, founder of the literary journal, Krasnaya Nov.

When Nadezhda Mandelstam visited Herzen House in Leningrad the day after the announcement, she found two eminent writers, Nikolai Tikhonov and Pyotr Pavlenko, drinking wine to celebrate Averbakh's downfall.

As early as 1929, Stalin complained in a letter to his deputy Vyacheslav Molotov about certain young communists, including Averbakh, who treated the party as a "discussion club" where they could "review policy" instead of awaiting instructions.

[9] Most of Averbakh's former colleagues in RAPP, with the notable exception of the playwright Vladimir Kirshon, deserted him after this public humiliation, but he continued to enjoy the protection of Yagoda, and of Maxim Gorky.

In 1935, Gorky, Averbakh and the NKVD officer Semyon Firin, the deputy head of Gulag, co-edited a book lauding construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal by convict labour.