Hungary opens communist-era secret police files to public

Hungary published the names and personal details of tens of thousands of people recruited by its communist-era secret police on Wednesday, opening archives that successive governments had kept closed since one-party rule ended in 1989.

The records can be searched on nyitottaktak.hu, a state archive website. Euronews reported that the release covered between 50,000 and 60,000 former agents. Prime Minister Péter Magyar, who made full disclosure a campaign promise before his landslide election win in April, said it fulfilled a pledge from the 1990 change of regime.

"After 36 years, we are finally fulfilling what was once one of the key promises of the 1990 regime change, a promise that was later denied and lied about," Magyar told a briefing at the state security archives in Budapest. He asked Hungarians to treat the publication "with dignity and humanity" and said many families would now face difficult information, often about a deceased relative.

The date was symbolic. On 4 November 1956, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest and other cities to crush Hungary's short-lived revolution.

The documents include Form 6 cards, registration sheets that record an informer's real name, codename, date of birth, address, mother's name, occupation, whether recruitment was voluntary or forced by blackmail or coercion, and the name of the handling officer. B-dossiers giving the recruitment registers in more detail are being digitised and will be published on 25 February, the BBC reported. Since 1998 Hungarians have been able to apply for their own files, but names were often blacked out and many records withheld.

Bendegúz Cseh Gergő, director general of the Historical Archives of State Security Services, told the Hungarian news agency MTI that the archive holds about 10,000 files running to hundreds of thousands of pages. The content of such records is not necessarily true and is certainly incomplete, he said. He added that a large proportion of the informants were people who did not make their mark on national public life.

The BBC put the number recruited between December 1944 and February 1990 at 150,000 to 160,000. Euronews reported about 150,000 agents over four decades, with only about a third of their names known and detailed information for roughly 10%.

Zsuzsanna Borvendég, a historian and MEP for the far-right Our Homeland party, told Hungarian media that "in the overwhelming majority of surviving agent reports, it isn't even possible to identify the agent, let alone their motives." Publishing names without explaining the circumstances of recruitment risked misleading the public, she said.

The historian Krisztián Ungváry, who has campaigned for open access, argued that citizens have a right to know what the state recorded about them. László Eörsi of the 1956 Institute Foundation called the release "better late than never" but warned against judging anyone merely for appearing on the list, noting that some recruits never filed a report and instead turned against the authorities.

Euronews reported that the government will set up hotlines offering counselling to people affected by the disclosures.