36 years later: Hungary opens Communist-era secret service files

On November 4, 1956, tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers and tanks swept into Hungary, brutally suppressing the country's anti-Communist uprising. Decades of dictatorship followed, relying on Hungary's brutal secret police to keep the system in place.

Events on Nov. 4 this year represent something of a reckoning with this dark chapter of Hungarian history.

Prime Minister Peter Magyar's government is ordering the full release of the country's secret police "agent files," which contain the names of Hungarian state security informants, some of whom cooperated out of their own volition even as others passed on information unwittingly.

Magyar and his Tisza party had previously promised to make the "agent files" public if elected. Their release is an historic event, as it comes after over three decades of heated debate over how to handle such sensitive files. The decision to publish is also sure to spark further debate on Communist-era guilt and responsibility.

Release opposed for years

Hungarians have been calling for the release of the 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 released. Demands for their publication were expressed repeatedly over 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 blocked efforts to open the files, voting more than 30 times against such plans since 2010, according to Hungarian news platform Telex.

A partial release of state security files did occur in the 1990s, when the Hungarian parliament passed the so-called "agents law" in 1994. This required members of the government, members of parliament and certain public servants to undergo background checks to determine whether they had ever worked for the former state security services.

From 1997, Hungarian citizens have been able to view their own files and in 2003, permissions were expanded. But they have never been able to find out the names of informants.

The law relevant to the files contained provisions that were open to broad interpretation, which allowed government agencies such as the Ministry of Interior to prevent the transfer of files from the secret police to the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security, or ABTL, if they believed it would compromise national security.

Such a selective release of files not only prevented Hungarian society from learning the truth about its state security service, it also made it possible for files to be exploited in political power struggles, for example, by leaking compromising information about politicians to the public.

One such case involved former Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy, who was exposed by the Fidesz-affiliated daily Magyar Nemzet in 2002 for having worked as a Communist-era secret agent.

Political fallout expected

Magyar's government is putting an end to this. From Nov. 4, databases containing all the names of, and key information about, informants will be made available online.

Additional databases will be released as well. They include one of the most extensive databases on individuals recruited to work for the Hungarian state security agency. Confidentiality provisions set out in the old "agent law" have also been scaled back, meaning significantly more files will likely be accessible in the future.

The upcoming release of data on up to 60,000 out of an estimated 150,000 secret police informants could have major political consequences. Even so, ABTL director Bendeguz Gergo Cseh recently cautioned that, "you can't believe everything the state security agencies and their files claim." Many documents were incomplete and not fully reliable and many files had been destroyed, he said.

Others are also skeptical about the release. Historian Janos M. Rainer, an expert on Hungary's dictatorship, told Telex that the publication would have made sense right after the fall of the regime. Releasing the files after all these years is more of a symbolic gesture, he argued.

Meanwhile historian Krisztian Ungvary, who has researched the state security files extensively, welcomes the upcoming publication. It will allow historians to pursue new research and society to engage in fresh debates, Ungvary told DW. He believes Hungary will benefit from such reflection, as "societal lies inevitably lead to a strained relationship with politics and the price we paid for that was 16 years of Fidesz rule."

Political reckoning

For Magyar, making this information public carries great significance. The idea of coming to terms with the past, especially the years of the Orban regime, is one of his favorite topics.

When the Hungarian parliament amended the law about the files in mid-September, Magyar wrote on Facebook that, "after a 36-year delay, the Hungarian parliament today decided, at the initiative of Tisza, to make the 'agent files' public. Fidesz did not support the motion. I wonder why?"

It was an allusion to the fact that many prominent figures in Fidesz' ranks and in Orban's inner circle were members of the Hungarian Communist party or secret police.

The most well-known of the latter is likely Jozsef Horvath, a former full-time employee of the department of Hungarian state security that was responsible for suppressing the domestic opposition.

Under Orban, Horvath worked as an intelligence officer and security advisor, and in 2024, he became the research director of Orban's Sovereignty Protection Office. This was an agency that exposed supposed enemies of the Orban regime, branding them " foreign agents ."

This article was originally published in German.