Cast of Characters
Sean Guillory wrote, edited, and produced Teddy Goes to the USSR, his first audio documentary. He's a historian of Russia/Soviet Union and a podcaster. In 2015, he started the SRB Podcast, a weekly interview show on Eurasian politics, culture, and history. He has since embraced the art of audio narrative. Sean works in the University of Pittsburgh's Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Center where he holds the undistinguished title of Digital Scholarship Curator. He's a Los Angeleno at heart and misses three things about the City of Angels: the Lakers, In-N-Out Burger, and the weather. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for reasons he's still trying to figure out.
Teddy Roe was born into a dry-land farm family in southwestern Nebraska. After a stint in the U.S. Army and finishing a journalism degree, Teddy resumed his personal desire to travel: first, a year-long study and travel in South America. Then, while working as an assistant to the Majority Leader of the US Senate, a three-month jaunt in the Soviet Union, my himself, at the height of the Cold War. The trip took him to all 15 Soviet republics, including areas newly opened to dollar-bearing tourists. The Soviet trip, fraught with dangers expected from a Cold War adversary, resulted in a personal diary of several hundred pages. Now, five decades later, the public gets to read it and, by extension, its prescient reasoning why the seemingly indestructible Soviet Union collapsed barely 23 years later!
Eduard Andryushchenko has a PhD in history, and is a journalist and researcher in the Ukrainian KGB archives. He is the founder of 
Laura A. Belmonte is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences and Professor of History at Virginia Tech. She received her A.B. in History and Political Science from the University of Georgia and her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia. She is author of The International LGBT Rights Movement: A History (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Penn, 2008); co-author of Global Americans: A Transnational U.S. History (Cengage, 2018); and editor of Speaking of America: Readings in U.S. History (2nd edition, Cengage, 2006).
Natalya Chernyshova is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Winchester, UK, with research interests in late Soviet culture, everyday life, politics, nationalism, and Belarusian history. She has published academic journal articles on Belarusian and late Soviet history and is the author of Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era (Routledge). She has also written on Belarus' history and contemporary affairs for The Conversation, History & Policy, PONARS Eurasia, and History Today. Natalya is currently working on a political biography of Petr Masherau, the First Secretary of the Belarusian Communist Party during 1965 - 1980. This research project is funded by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship during 2020-22.
Dina Fainberg is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at City, University of London. Dina is an historian of US-Russian relations, Soviet media, and the Cold War. Born in the Soviet Union, Dina has lived in Israel, the US, Germany, Netherlands, and the UK. She is the author of Cold War Correspondents: Soviet and American Reporters on the Ideological Frontlines (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021) and the co-editor of Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era: Ideology and Exchange (Lexington Books, 2016).
Alexey Golubev is a scholar of Russian history with a focus on social and cultural history of the twentieth century and an additional expertise in Science and Technology Studies, transnational history, and digital history. He’s the author of several articles and books, including The Search for a Socialist El Dorado: Finnish Immigration from the United States and Canada to Soviet Karelia in the 1930s published in 2014 by Michigan State University Press. And most recently The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia published by Cornell University Press in 2020.
Leah Goldman is Assistant Professor of European History at Washington & Jefferson College and Associated Scholar at the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research investigates the interplay of cultural production and state authority in the Soviet Union through the lens of classical music. Leah has published articles in Journal of Musicology and Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, and her monograph, Creative Comrades: Censorship and Collaboration in Late Stalinist Music is under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press. Her research has been funded by grants from the Fulbright-Hays Program, Mellon-Council for European Studies, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She prefers to spend her free time with dogs.
Alex Hazanov holds a PhD in Soviet history from the University of Pennsylvania. An avid traveler who lived in seven countries and three continents, he wrote a dissertation about the encounters between foreign travelers to the Soviet Union and the Soviet system in the post-Stalin era. A recovering academic, he spent some years working as a geopolitical risk consultant in the private sector, and is about to start a second career as a forensic accountant. He still hopes to one day see his dissertation, “Porous Empire: Foreign Visitors and the Post-Stalin Soviet State,” turned into a book, perhaps with an epilogue recording how travel to the Russian Federation once again became a rare and fraught adventure.Robert Hornsby is Associate Professor in Modern European History at the University of Leeds. Focusing mainly on the Khrushchev period, his most recent research has explored dissenting activity and regimes responses, as well as the social and political history of the Communist Youth League (Komsomol). He's the author of Protest, Reform and Repression in Khrushchev's Soviet Union.
Andrew Jacobs (PhD, Indiana University 2019) is a former historian of the USSR. He now serves as Technical Trainer and Director of Workforce Education at a manufacturing company in Minnesota.
Maxim Matusevich is Professor of Global History at Seton Hall University, where he also directs the Russian and East European Studies Program. Maxim has published extensively on the history of African-Soviet encounters during the Cold War, as well as the history of contacts between Black radicals and intellectuals and the Soviet Union. He is the author of No Easy Row for a Russian Hoe: Ideology and Pragmatism in Nigerian-Soviet Relations, 1960-1991 (Africa World Press) and editor of Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: Three Centuries of Encounters (Africa World Press).
A native of Chicago, Baby Boomer Donald J. Raleigh graduated from Knox College and took his graduate degrees at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has traveled some 45 times to the USSR/Russia and is one of the pioneers of “local history” in the field of Russian studies. He taught at the University of Hawaii before joining the History Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he is Jay Richard Judson Distinguished Professor of History emeritus. Raleigh has authored, translated, and edited numerous books on the history of revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union, including Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov; Experiencing Russia’s Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917-1922; and Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation. He currently is writing a biography of Leonid Brezhnev.
Meredith L. Roman is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Brockport, and the author of Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of U.S. Racism, 1928-1937. Her work has also appeared in several academic journals including The Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, Race & Class, Cold War History, Women, Gender, and Families of Color, and forthcoming in the Journal of Russian American Studies. Her current research focuses on the intersection of race, gender, human rights, and state violence in the Soviet Union and United States during the Cold War.Art
Nik Arnoldi drew the episode art for Teddy Goes to the USSR. He is an illustrator and educator whose work primarily focuses on history and social justice. You can find Nik's work at NikArnoldi.com or on most social media platforms: @nikarnoldi.
Trailers
Victoria Spooner produced the trailers for Teddy Goes to the USSR. I am an audio maker, writer, and musician based in South East London. I’ve worked with fiction writers to create dynamic audio versions of their tales, small businesses to create engaging branded content, and professionals in leadership and psychology to share fascinating conversations with others in their fields. My own work is about music, folk traditions, and nature. I love long form narrative podcasts the most and can often be found reading about western occultism and trees. If I visit the sea, I will not be satisfied unless I get in it. I play bass guitar and ukulele and have very strong feelings about tea.Acknowledgements
Eduard Andryushchenko • Eve Baran • John Biewen • Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University • Cindy Carpien • Nancy Condee • Trevor Erlacher • Leah Goldman • Maya Haber • Gabe Kramer • Kate Lawrence • Zsuzsa Magdo • John McKerley • Sera Passerini • Gina Pierce • Hunter Piermont • Emily Shaw • Mark Simon • Victoria Spooner • Joe Weisberg