Hungary’s new government will on Wednesday reveal the names of tens of thousands of state informants from the communist era in an attempt to confront the past and rebuild public trust. From 1945 to 1989, Hungary’s communist state-security services relied on an extensive network of informants to monitor society and suppress dissent. Some were blackmailed or coerced into reporting on neighbours, friends, colleagues and even family members; others were recruited through promises of various advantages.
For decades, the extent of this network was hidden from public view. The “agent files”, held in the basement of the Historical Archives of the State Security services, remained largely inaccessible to the public, despite repeated calls and partial leaks. During his campaign leading up to Hungary’s April parliamentary elections, Péter Magyar promised to make the state-security files public, a promise he seems intent on fulfilling now he is in power.
In September, his government passed a law paving the way for the files to be made public, a move more than two-thirds of the country supported according to polls. The release was initially scheduled for the anniversary of the 1956 anti-Soviet revolution but was pushed back to 4 November. Previously, access to the reports on informants was restricted to researchers and relatives of victims.
With the new, searchable online database, Hungary’s former state-service will become the most transparent in the former eastern bloc, researchers say. But on a personal level, I feel for those who will face their family’s history for the first time,” Papp said. Of the 50,000 to 60,000 people whose names appear in the files, historians estimate 10% are alive today.
For three decades, the former eastern bloc has been divided on how to publish agent files, and when. In East Germany, the Bundestag opened state security Stasi files in 1992. In the Czech Republic, they became open to the public in 2003.
Most recently, Latvia published files on informants in 2018. Miklós Kiss, a survivor of a Hungarian forced labour camp and president of an association for victims, would have preferred if Hungary had followed Germany’s example and released the files earlier. Even so, the collection is small compared with that of the Polish or Romanian secret services, Papp said.
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