In 1915 she began to perform independently in theaters of Kharkiv, Odessa, Tiflis, Kazan, and other cities.

In 1926, Vsevolod Pudovkin cast her as Nilovna, the heroine of his revolutionary tragedy Mother, an adaptation of Maksim Gorky’s 1906 novel.

Baranovskaia, who was 40 at the time of shooting, portrayed a much older woman who is devoted to her son and ultimately accepts the inevitability of class struggle.

Pudovkin also cast Baranovskaia as the harsh worker’s wife who undergoes a transformation in The End of St. Petersburg (1927).

Sometimes she played parts of proletarians, as in Mikhail Dubson’s Poison Gas (1929) and Carl Jung-hans’s Such Is Life (1929).