In 1902 Lebed graduated some railroad school when he was 9 years of age and since 1908 worked at a local stamping plant.

From May 1924 to December 1925 Lebed was Chairman of the Central Control Commission of the Communist Party of Ukraine and People's Commissar of the Workers 'and Peasants' Inspection of the Ukrainian SSR.

On August 1, 1937, Lebed was arrested on charges of "Ukrainian nationalism," and on October 29, 1937, he was sentenced to death and shot the next day.

On September 7, 1922, while reporting to Joseph Stalin, Valerian Kuibyshev, and Vyacheslav Molotov on the arrests of "anti-Soviet intellectuals" in Ukraine, he wrote: "...that it was not advisable to send Ukrainian professors abroad at all, but to they should be limited to deportation to remote areas.

Although the ideas of this figure were shared by many of his superiors in Moscow, they were considered premature, so he and a number of other prominent non-Ukrainian party officials were recalled.