Vladimir Nicolayevich Beneshevich was born on August 9, 1874, in Druya, Vilna Governorate of the Russian Empire (now Vitebsk Region in Belarus).
Upon his return to Russia, he married Amata Ludmila Faddeevne (1888–1967), daughter of professor of classical philology Faddei Zielinski at the University of St. Petersburg.
[2] Between 1900 and 1905 Beneshevich worked in libraries in Europe and the Middle East, studying Slavic and Byzantine written sources, and participated in his first archaeological expeditions to the ancient religious center of Mount Athos, Mount Sinai, Egypt, Greece, Asia Minor, and Palestine.
He was granted access to handwritten monastic collections in 49 European libraries, and worked in Paris, Vienna, Munich, and Rome, discovering many hitherto-unknown legal monuments in the process.
In the same year, and together with egyptologist Boris Alexandrovich Turayev and linguist Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr, Beneshevich initiated the founding of the journal Christian East under the auspices of the Imperial Academy of Sciences.
[5] In 1914, on the eve of World War I, Beneshevich published his doctoral thesis on the Synagogue among the 50 works and other Canonical Collections of John Scholasticus.
In 1927, he was granted permission to travel to Germany on a three-month scientific mission, where he had the opportunity to study a number of Greek manuscripts.
From 1933 Beneshevich then served as archivist of Greek manuscripts in public libraries, and lectured on Byzantine history at Leningrad State University.
In October, an article in Izvestia portrayed this as a betrayal, and questioned why a Russian scientific work was published in Nazi Germany.
[3] Together with his twin sons and brother, who had been indicted on the same charges, Vladimir Nicolayevich Beneshevich was shot by the NKVD on 17 January 1938 in Leningrad.