Who's Who in the Socialist Countries

It is a goal of libraries to provide up-to-date and accurate information. However, what information qualifies as current is a moving target. As global events reshape national boundaries and governments, reference works that were once new and relevant become historical artifacts documenting bygone eras. This work would have been particularly useful to scholars at Lehigh when it was published as it provided information about people living behind the metaphorical iron curtain, where public information was carefully curated or censored. As the book’s editors note, this work was compiled differently from the regular type of “who’s who” that relied on questionnaires filled out by the included subjects, which was not possible in the mostly authoritarian countries being featured. This work was simultaneously published in the Federal Republic of Germany, which would eventually reunify with the socialist German Democratic Republic twelve years after its publication in 1990.

Borys Lewytzkyj.
Who's Who in the Socialist Countries: a Biographical Encyclopedia of 10,000 Leading Personalities in 16 Communist Countries. New York: K. G. Saur Pub., 1978.

Lehigh University Catalog Record: https://asa.lib.lehigh.edu/asa/Record/108085