He protested, as part of a student movement, against a Russian plan to do away with university autonomy, and spent three months in jail in 1883.

[1] During this period he also was one of three scientists (with Mikhail Gavrilovich Tartakovsky and Nikolai Mikhailovich Berestnev) who led the Special Laboratory set up in 1898 on Fort Alexander an artificial island in the Gulf of Finland near Kotlin Island, where plague vaccines and serums were produced and experiments with pathogens for the plague and cholera were done.

From 1924 to 1928 he was professor at the Military Medical Academy in Leningrad and in 1928 founded is now called the Zabolotny Institute of Microbiology and Virology, in Kyiv.

[4] Zabolotny conducted groundbreaking research on a number of infectious diseases, including cholera, diphtheria, dysentery, plague, syphilis, and typhus, as well as on gangrene.

[1] Having done extensive field work in Northern China,[5] he was an "influential" delegate at the 1911 Mukden Conference where China, forced by the Manchurian plague that killed 60,000 people, "embrac[ed] a Western approach to medical care, with the intention of promoting public health during the first years of Chinese Republic".