[4] Filipchenko graduated from Second Saint Petersburg in 1900, but due to a variety of financial difficulties that were further complicated by his father's death, he entered the Military Medical Academy.

However, Filipchenko soon transferred to the natural science division at Saint Petersburg State University only a year after entering the academy.

[4] Filipchenko was arrested in December 1905 due to being present at a meeting of the Soviet Workers' Deputies, but was released shortly afterwards.

He pursued comparative embryology for his candidate's thesis due to his interest in the presentation and evolution of physical characteristics in animals.

[5] However, in the wake of the first five-year plan, Filipchenko became publicly castigated for his work in orthogenesis and in eugenics[4] and was relieved of his position at Saint Petersburg State University in 1930.

[4] Filipchenko developed a severe headache whilst working at Peterhof, and concerned about his health, traveled to Leningrad to be taken care of by his brother Aleksandr.

[4] Filipchenko's investigations into genetics, craniometry, the inheritance of quantitative characters, and neurology eventually introduced him to ideas on eugenics that were being developed by his contemporaries in the United States and Europe.

[2] Filipchenko and his Bureau of Eugenics created charts of the pedigrees of various Soviet academics and intellectuals in an attempt to ascertain the location of "race" within an individual.

[5] But Filipchenko was staunchly against Bolshevik ideas regarding the sterilization of undesirables and mass insemination of women by men with exceptional genetics,[8] stating that such acts were "crude assaults on the human person" and that the best way to create a "desirable breed" was through positive selection.

[4] Filipchenko was the first professor in Russia to introduce genetics at the collegiate level due to his annual course on inheritance Petersburg University, which he started teaching in 1913.

[10] His articles and textbooks on inheritance were some of the first entry points for Russian biologists like Dobzhansky to modern genetics, and it is for this reason that Soviet botanist and historian Peter Zhukovsky once called Filipchenko "the teacher of our youth.