She began collecting plants and from about 1861 she was using her art and language skills to translate academic descriptions from English, French and German naturalists.

She and her husband worked together and when in 1868 he was recommended to undertake a hazardous mission to the recently conquered region of Russian Turkestan.

Kaufman's team included the Fedchenkos, the war artist Vasily Vereshchagin and later the educationalist and linguist Nikolai Ostroumov.

[4] The Fedchenkos did not set out immediately for Turkestan but they went on preparatory visits to Italy, France and Sweden to study their collections.

[2] Together they went on botanical expeditions to the Caucasus, Crimea, Kyrgyzstan, southern Urals, West Tien Shan and the Pamir ranges.

The local newspaper was used to publish the scientific findings and Kaufman was targeting the 1872 Moscow All-Russian Technical Exhibition as an opportunity to display Turkestan research and artefacts.

Alexei died in 1873, aged 29, in a climbing accident on Mont Blanc,[1][3] where he had gone to compare the glaciers with those he had seen in Turkestan.

In the Memoirs of the Kazan Society of Naturalists Vol.32 and 33, Olga and Boris described 43 endemic species in the buttercup family Ranunculaceae found in Russian Turkestan.

[3] Olga contributed to Gardeners' Chronicle on 10 June 1905, giving a short description of Eremurus turkestanicus.

[citation needed] In 1922, Modest Mikhaĭlovich Iljin (a botanist from the Botanical Garden of the Academy of Sciences of Soviet Russia) named a genus of Asteraceae (from Central Asia) in her honour Olgaea.