A member of the executive committee of Narodnaya Volya, she participated in the assassination of Alexander II of Russia and was tried during the Trial of the 20.

She spent her early life living with her brother Peter, the local judge of the Zamoskvorechye District.

[3] In 1881, she took part in the assassination of Alexander II, helping to construct and lay a land mine under Saint Petersburg's Malaya Sadovaya Street.

During the Russian Revolution of 1905, revolutionaries in her home town of Bogorodsk disarmed the police, organized tax noncompliance and forebade local clerks from working.

After the establishment of the Soviet Union, Lebedeva was condemned by a secretary of the Communist Party committee in Bogorodsk: "she killed a good tsar, is it worth keeping her memory alive?"