[3] He is best known for setting the foundations for quantitative fisheries science (including the Baranov catch equation) as well as for his contributions to development of fishing technology.

[2] In 1915, Baranov was appointed as a professor at the Department of Commercial Fisheries of the Moscow Agricultural Academy.

[1][3][4] Many of Baranov's peers felt that his theories were anti-Marxist, and he even risked being sent to a Gulag labor colony, only to be saved by N. N. Andreev, another fisheries technologist (and former student of Baranov[2]) and secretary of the Communist Party Committee at the Fisheries Institute.

[6] In this paper, he presents the basic theory of fish population dynamics, including the famous catch equation.

Although Baranov's ideas have been very influential to fisheries science as we know it today, it is often acknowledged that the significance of his work was only slowly recognized,[3] and perhaps he has not yet received credit from the western world that he deserves.