Barbara Engel is Distinguished Professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the author of Between the Fields and the City, Women in Russia, and most recently, Breaking the Ties that Bound, as well as of numerous articles.

Clifford Rosenthal worked for ten years as a translator of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Subsequently, he led a national association of credit unions serving low-income communities for more than three decades, twice consulting with the Russian credit union movement as a member of an international delegation.