Erbanov, Mikhei Nikolaevich

Born Feb. 26 (Mar. 10), 1889, in the ulus (Buriat settlement) of Bol’shoi Bakhtai, in the present-day Buriat ASSR; died Feb. 8, 1938. Soviet government and party figure, one of the organizers of the struggle for Soviet power in Buriat Mongolia. Became a member of the Communist Party in 1917. The son of a Buriat peasant.

In 1909, Erbanov completed surveying courses as a topographer. In 1917 he became a member of the Buriat-Mongolian National Revolutionary Committee. In 1918–19, in the period of Kolchak’s ascendancy, Erbanov was a member of the Irkutsk underground party committee. He helped organize the partisan movement in the Buriat raions. In 1920–21 he was a member of the Irkutsk Provincial Committee of the RCP(Bolshevik) and the chief of the provincial land section. In 1921, Erbanov served as the chairman of the revolutionary committee of the Buriat-Mongolian Autonomous Oblast. In 1922–23 he was chairman of the executive committee of the Buriat-Mongolian Autonomous Oblast. In 1923 he became chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Buriat-Mongolian ASSR, serving simultaneously after 1925 as chairman of its Central Executive Committee.

Erbanov spent the years 1927 to 1929 taking courses under the Central Committee of the ACP(Bolshevik). From 1929 to 1937 he served as first secretary of the Buriat-Mongolian Oblast committee and as a member of the Siberian Krai Committee of the ACP(B). He was a delegate to the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Congresses of the ACP(B). At the Seventeenth Congress, he was elected a member of the Central Auditing Commission. He served as a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR.

Erbanov was awarded the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner.