He served as the head of the Department of Uralic and Altaic languages at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
He was editor-in-chief of the journal Советская тюркология (Soviet Turcology) ISSN 0131-677X[1] and of the multi-volume publication Сравнительно-историческая грамматика тюркских языков (Comparative-historical grammar of the Turkic languages).
During the Second World War, Tenishev applied to fight at the front but was rejected due to poor eyesight and worked instead at a post office and at the radio center of a military factory.
[2] After the war he entered Leningrad State University's Oriental faculty, where he studied under a variety of linguists, philologists, and orientalists, including Sergey Malov, Ignaty Krachkovsky, Nikolai Dmitriev, and Vasily Struve.
In 1954 Tenishev began work in the Turkic languages section of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences under the supervision of Nikolai Dmitriev.