Informer Files: Hungary Set to Reveal Communist Spy Network
Budapest, November 2: Hungary is poised to take a historic step as its government prepares to disclose the names of thousands of people who acted as informers for communist-era security agencies. The information will be published on November 4 through a publicly accessible online database.
The government argues that the disclosure will shed light on a buried past and help restore faith in democratic institutions.
Prime Minister Peter Magyar addressed the matter in a message on X. Calling it a central promise of the Tisza party, he said the secret police files from the era of dictatorship would be made public on November 4. He noted that the decision would be hard and sensitive for many families, but said Hungary cannot achieve real political change without facing its history.
The database will be available on Wednesday, November 4, allowing citizens to look up the names of people who worked for the country's security services from 1945 to 1989. During those decades, the communist government is said to have assembled a broad network of informants to monitor society and silence dissent.
The current administration believes that some participants were forced through blackmail or pressure to disclose details about neighbors, friends, colleagues and even family members. Others, it says, were attracted by a range of benefits.
The network, which functioned for about four decades, had a scale that remained largely unknown to the public. The files were stored in the basement archives of the state security agencies, and for years they were inaccessible to ordinary people. Although the demand for their release was raised many times and some documents were leaked, the complete record was never disclosed.
Before the April parliamentary elections, Magyar campaigned on a promise to open these documents. Once in power, his government passed a law in September to carry it out. Surveys show that more than two-thirds of the population supports the move. The files were initially expected to be released on the anniversary of the 1956 anti-Soviet revolution, but the date was later changed to November 4.
Social Relations and Culture Minister Zoltan Tarr wrote on Facebook: 'A democratic society has the right to know its past.' Until now, only researchers and relatives of victims could consult the informants' reports. Historians think the new online arrangement could make Hungary the most transparent security archive among the communist countries of Eastern Europe.
Historians estimate that the files include between 50,000 and 60,000 individuals, of whom only about 10 percent are alive today. The question of making these documents public has been debated in Hungary for the past three decades.
Other nations have followed similar paths. East Germany opened the files of its infamous Stasi secret police in 1992, the Czech Republic provided access to such records in 2003, and Latvia published files on informants in 2018.