36 Years On, Hungary Opens Its Communist-Era Secret Police Files, Naming Informants

On November 4, 1956, tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers and tanks rolled into Hungary and crushed the anti-Communist uprising. The dictatorship that followed leaned heavily on a secret police to hold the system together. Seventy years of memory later, on the same date this year, the Hungarian government has chosen to open that police's records.

Prime Minister Peter Magyar's government is ordering the full release of the so-called agent files, which contain the names of state security informants. Some of those informants cooperated willingly; others passed on information without knowing it. Magyar and his Tisza party had promised before the election to make the files public, and from November 4 databases holding the informants' names and key information about them are to be available online.

The release follows more than three decades of argument. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and Soviet rule ended, civil rights activists and smaller parties called for the files to be opened, and repeated the demand in the decades after. Jozsef Antall, the conservative who became Hungary's first post-Communist prime minister, rejected the idea. So did Viktor Orban's long-ruling Fidesz party, which, according to the Hungarian news platform Telex, voted against opening the files more than 30 times since 2010.

What Hungary had was a partial, uneven opening. A 1994 "agents law" required members of the government, members of parliament and certain public servants to be checked for past work with the state security services. From 1997 citizens could view their own files, and access was widened in 2003. But no one could learn the names of informants. The law also contained broadly interpretable provisions that let agencies such as the Ministry of Interior block the transfer of files from the secret police to the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security, known as ABTL, if they judged national security to be at risk.

That selectivity had a cost beyond the withheld truth: it allowed files to be used as weapons in political fights. One example is former Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy, who was exposed in 2002 by the Fidesz-affiliated daily Magyar Nemzet as a Communist-era secret agent.

The new rules go further. Besides the informant databases, additional ones are to be released, including one of the most extensive records of people recruited by the Hungarian state security agency. Confidentiality provisions in the old agent law have been scaled back, so significantly more files will likely become accessible. The first release covers data on up to 60,000 of an estimated 150,000 informants, which could have major political consequences.

Even the keeper of the archive urges caution. ABTL director Bendeguz Gergo Cseh warned recently that one cannot believe everything the state security agencies and their files claim; many documents are incomplete and unreliable, and many files were destroyed. Historian Janos M. Rainer, an expert on the dictatorship, told Telex that publication would have made sense right after the regime fell, and that now it is more a symbolic gesture. Historian Krisztian Ungvary, who has researched the files extensively, welcomes it. He told DW it will open new avenues for research and fresh public debate, and argued that "societal lies" strain the relationship with politics, a price he says Hungary paid with 16 years of Fidesz rule.

For Magyar, reckoning with the past, especially the Orban years, is a favorite theme. When parliament amended the law in mid-September, he wrote on Facebook that after a 36-year delay parliament had decided, on Tisza's initiative, to make the files public, adding that Fidesz did not support the motion and asking why. The jab alluded to the many prominent Fidesz figures and members of Orban's inner circle who were in the Communist party or the secret police.

The best known may be Jozsef Horvath, a former full-time employee of the state security department responsible for suppressing domestic opposition. Under Orban he worked as an intelligence officer and security adviser, and in 2024 became research director of the Sovereignty Protection Office, the agency that exposed supposed enemies of the Orban government and branded them foreign agents. What the databases reveal, and how reliable it proves, will shape the political fallout to come.