Magyar Revealed The Names Of 60,000 Communist Agents
- 5.11.2026, 18:41
The Hungarians found out who had collaborated with the secret police.
The Hungarian government has granted citizens access to digitized secret service documents from 1945–1990. The declassified files contain the names of approximately 60,000 people who collaborated with the secret police at various times. Parliament decided to publish these files shortly after the opponents of former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán won the general election in April 2026, according to Politico.
The current head of government, Péter Magyar, called on Hungarians to “approach this long-overdue publication with dignity and humanity”: in his words, “many families will now be confronted with unpleasant information.” The Minister of Culture expressed hope that the publication of the documents “will help achieve long-term reconciliation by revealing the secrets of the past.”
The archive consists of three sections: “Form No. 6,” that is, registration cards for freelance collaborators and those who refused to work with the secret services; the state security archive’s registry for identifying potential agents; and the secret services’ digitized database as of 1990. In February 2027, a fourth section is scheduled to go live—containing the complete files of informants.
The issue of publishing the archives has been raised repeatedly in Hungarian society. However, in the 1990s and 2000s, the authorities agreed only to a partial release of the files, and even then with numerous restrictions. This gave rise to rumors that among those implicated were former state security agents from the pro-Soviet era. In particular, Orbán himself was accused of having ties to the old secret police, a claim he has repeatedly denied.
“Our goal is for the public to be able to take the first step toward studying this period of recent history with the help of the published documents. […] Unfortunately, these records have never been—and never will be—complete. Many sources fell victim to the systematic and periodic destruction of documents prior to 1990,” the project’s authors explain.
From 1945 to 1990, Hungary (the Hungarian People’s Republic) was ruled by a pro-Soviet one-party regime. As in other Warsaw Pact countries, the secret police played a special role, working closely with Soviet agencies. Initially, this was a separate State Security Directorate (AVH), but in the 1960s, the authorities reorganized it into the Third Directorate of the republic’s Ministry of Internal Affairs.
According to modern estimates, at least 700 Hungarians were executed in the People’s Republic of Hungary on political charges, and another 70,000 or so were imprisoned in Soviet-style prisons and camps. The peak of the repression occurred in the late 1940s and in 1957–1958, when the Hungarian communists first established their dictatorship and then persecuted participants in the 1956 national uprising. Dissidents faced dismissals, surveillance, and criminal prosecution right up until the very end of the Hungarian People’s Republic.
After the fall of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, the new authorities in most countries announced their intention to fully declassify the files of the abolished secret services. In practice, this process ran into restrictions, delays, and resistance from former pro-communist officials. By the mid-2020s, the eastern regions of Germany (the former GDR), Latvia, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic provided the most open and comprehensive access to the archives of the KGB and its partners.