During World War II, Lebedev worked in the field of control automation of complex systems.

To perform these tasks Lebedev developed an analog computer system to solve ordinary differential equations.

From 1946 to 1951 he headed the Kiev Electrotechnical Institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, working on improving the stability of electrical systems.

In 1948 Lebedev learned from foreign magazines that scientists in western countries were working on the design of electronic computers, although the details were secret.

Lebedev then began development of a new, more powerful computer, the M-20, the number denoting its expected processing speed of twenty thousand operations per second.