His mother died when he was two years old, while his father, Mikhail, worked in Ukraine.

Since 1970, he was the instructor, the deputy head of the department of the Voronezh regional committee of the CPSU.

In March 1994, he was elected a deputy, and in April, he became the 1st chairman of the Voronezh Oblast Duma.

On 8 December 1996, with the support of the NPSR and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Shabanov was elected governor of the Voronezh Oblast, receiving 49% of the vote (with a turnout of 52%), defeating the incumbent acting governor Aleksandr Tsapin, who received 41% of the votes.

In the next gubernatorial elections, on 24 December 2000, he received 15% of the votes cast, and lost the election to the head of the regional department of the Federal Security Service, Vladimir Kulakov, who won with 60% of the votes.