Teplyakov was born in the USSR on November 6, 1925. He was made to join the Red Army in January 1943 and fought in the Second World War on the Ukrainian front. After the war ended, he went to and graduated from the All-Union Correspondence Polytechnic Institute in Moscow. After leaving school, he began work at the Institute of Chemical Physics. From 1959-1966, he worked at Chelyabinsk-70, where he kept up his study of high-current proton . In 1966, he and several of the people that he worked with were moved to the Institute of High Energy Physics in Protvino, Russia.