On November 4, 1956, tens of thousands of Soviet troops and tanks invaded Hungary, brutally suppressing the country’s anti-communist uprising. Decades of dictatorship followed, relying on the brutal Hungarian secret police to keep the system in place.
The events of November 4 this year represent a sort of assessment of this dark chapter in Hungarian history.
Prime Minister Peter Magyar’s government has ordered the full publication of the country’s secret police “agent files”, which contain the names of Hungarian state security informants, some of whom cooperated voluntarily, while others passed on information without their knowledge.
Magyar and his Tisza party had previously promised to make “agents’ files” public if they were elected. Their publication is a historic event, because it comes after more than three decades of heated debates on how to handle such sensitive issues. The decision to publish will certainly also spark new debates about guilt and responsibility for the communist era.
Liberation opposed for years
Hungarians have been demanding the publication of these files for years. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of Soviet rule, civil rights activists and smaller Hungarian political parties said the files should be made public. Requests for their publication were expressed repeatedly over the following decades.
Yet Hungary’s first post-communist prime minister, Jozsef Antall, a conservative, rejected the idea, as did Viktor Orban’s long-ruling Fidesz party. The latter have blocked attempts to open the files, voting against such projects more than 30 times since 2010, according to the Hungarian information platform Telex.
Partial disclosure of state security files actually took place in the 1990s, when the Hungarian parliament passed the so-called “Agents Act” in 1994. This law required government members, parliamentarians and certain civil servants to undergo background checks to determine whether they had previously worked for the former state security services.
Since 1997, Hungarian citizens have been able to view their own files and in 2003 the permissions were extended. But they were never able to learn the names of the informants.
The Records Act contained provisions open to broad interpretation, which allowed government agencies such as the Interior Ministry to prevent the transfer of secret police files to the Hungarian State Security Historical Archive, or ABTL,
Such selective disclosure of files not only prevented Hungarian society from knowing the truth about its state security service, but it also allowed files to be exploited in political power struggles, for example by leaking compromising information about politicians to the public.
One of these cases concerned former Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy, who was denounced by the Fidesz-affiliated daily. Magyar Nemzet in 2002 for working as a secret agent during the communist era.
Expected political consequences
The Hungarian government is putting an end to it. Starting November 4, databases containing all the names and key information about the informants will go online.
Additional databases will also be released. They include one of the most comprehensive databases of people recruited to work for the Hungarian state security agency. The confidentiality provisions set out in the old “Agents Act” have also been reduced, meaning that significantly more files will likely be accessible in the future.
The upcoming publication of data on 60,000 secret police informants, out of an estimated 150,000, could have major political consequences. However, ABTL Director Bendeguz Gergo Cseh recently warned that “one cannot believe everything that state security agencies and their records claim.” Many documents were incomplete and not completely reliable and many files had been destroyed, he said.
Others are also skeptical about the release. Historian Janos M. Rainer, an expert on the Hungarian dictatorship, told Telex that the publication would have made sense just after the fall of the regime. Releasing the files after all these years is rather a symbolic gesture, he argued.
Historian Krisztian Ungvary, who has carried out extensive research into state security files, welcomes the upcoming publication. This will allow historians to pursue new research and society to engage in new debates, Ungvary told DW. He believes Hungary will benefit from such reflection, because “societal lies inevitably lead to strained relations with politics and the price we paid for this was 16 years of Fidesz rule.”
Political calculation
For Magyar, making this information public is of great importance. The idea of reconciling oneself with the past, particularly with the years of the Orban regime, is one of his favorite subjects.
When the Hungarian parliament amended the files law in mid-September, Magyar wrote on Facebook that “after 36 years of delay, the Hungarian parliament decided today, on Tisza’s initiative, to make ‘agent files’ public. Fidesz did not support the motion. I wonder why?”
This was an allusion to the fact that many prominent figures in the ranks of Fidesz and in Orban’s immediate entourage were members of the Hungarian Communist Party or the secret police.
Perhaps the best known of these is Jozsef Horvath, a former full-time employee of Hungary’s state security department charged with suppressing domestic opposition.
Under Orban, Horvath worked as an intelligence officer and security advisor, and in 2024 he became research director of Orban’s Sovereignty Protection Office. It was an agency that denounced alleged enemies of the Orban regime, calling them “foreign agents.”
This article was originally published in German.
Gn world
