Baranov, Petr

Baranov, Petr Ionovich

 

Born Sept. 10 (22), 1892, in St. Petersburg; died Sept. 5,1933. Soviet military and Party figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1912. Born into a working-class family.

From 1915, Baranov was in the army. Because of his revolutionary activities in 1916, he was sentenced to eight years in prison; he was released during the February revolution. In 1917 he was president of the front division of the Executive Committee of the Soviets of Soldiers’, Sailors’, Workers’, and Peasants’ Deputations of the Rumanian Front, Black Sea Front, and Odessa Military District; a member of the revolutionary committee of the Rumanian Front; and president of the revolutionary committee of the Eighth Army. Baranov was a member of the Red Army from 1918; he was commander of the Fourth Donets Army, chief of staff of the central board of the armed forces of the southern republics, and staff commissar and assistant head of the political section of the Fourth Army. From 1919 to 1920 he was a member of the Revolutionary Military Soviet (RVS) of the Eighth Army, the Southern Group of the Eastern Front, the Turkestan Front, and the First and Fourteenth armies. In 1921, Baranov was the head of the political section of the armed forces in the Ukraine and the Crimea and participated in the suppression of the Kronstadt Mutiny. In 1921–22 he was a member of the RVS of the Turkestan Front and a member of the Middle Asian Bureau of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik). In 1923 he was the chief and commissar of armored forces of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army (RKKA). From August 1923 he was the deputy, and from December 1924, the head of the air force of the RKKA; simultaneously, he was a member of the RVS of the USSR from 1925 to 1931. In January 1932, Baranov became the deputy people’s commissar of heavy industry and the head of the Main Directorate of the Aviation Industry. From 1924 he was a member of the Central Control Commission and from 1927 a candidate member of the Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik). Baranov was a member of the Central Executive Committee, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, and the Turkestan Central Executive Committee.

Baranov was awarded the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner. He died in an airplane crash and was buried in Moscow by the Kremlin wall.