Philip Diaczan (1831–1906) was one of the vital figures within the Russophiles of Galicia, a popular pro-Russian, anti-Polish movement in Austria-Hungary. Having studied in Vienna under Franc Miklosic, in 1858 he started his career as a Greek Catholic priest and a gymnasium teacher in Lviv and Berezhany, specializing in classical languages. In 1866, he moved to the Kingdom of Poland and soon led a mass exodus of Greek Catholic clergy fleeing to Russia in order to embrace better living conditions, and, eventually, join the Orthodox Church in 1875. A gymnasium teacher of classics, first in Chełm, then in Warsaw, in 1874 he was given a professorship at the University of Warsaw, which he held onto until 1903. Lacking in professional competence, he became the very epitome of a social climber and an apparatchik of the superintendent Alexander Apukhtin, giving a bad name to the Imperial University as a place purportedly full of intrigue and devoted to the Russification of Poles instead of spreading academic knowledge.
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