[citation needed] Philipp Zaitzev was born in Kiev, where his father was a postal officer.

He graduated in 1895 with a gold medal and joined St Petersburg University in the Faculty of Oriental Languages.

[citation needed] Zaitzev then taught histology at the St Petersburg Women's Medical Institute.

He met Nikolai Alexadndrovich Kholodkovsky and his student Eugeny Nikanorovich Pavlovsky and became involved in the establishment of a zoology department at Tbilisi.

[citation needed] From 1911, he was assigned to examine applied entomology in Transcaucasia and he began to organize an insect collection in the Tiflis Botanical Garden.