[2] Paducheva was born and raised in Moscow, with the exception of a period when her family was evacuated to Samarkand during World War II.
[1] Her father Viktor was rarely present during her youth, as he had been accused of Trotskyism and sent to labour camps from 1936 to 1942 (Norillag) and again from 1950 to 1954; she saw him just twice between these incarcerations, on business trips in 1943 and 1948.
[1] In 1951 she participated in the first Language and Literature Olympiad organized by the philology department at Moscow State University, where she met Andrey Zaliznyak for the first time.
[5] Paducheva worked extensively on computational lexicography, and played a leading role in the Lexicographer project for over thirty years.
[1][4] The project constructed a systematic database of Russian verbs, building on the insight that the lexicon is a system like other levels of linguistic analysis.