Hungary: Communist-era files released, up to 60k former agents revealed

Posted by rdmuser 23 hours ago

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Comment by haunter 22 hours ago

As a hungarian: agent would imply a member of the secret police which have already been released years ago. These are informants, regular people like students and teachers to members of the churches to actors and musicians etc.

Also

1, this should have been released long ago cause many of these people are already dead.

2, they only released the official record of the informant. Their background, who contacted them (from the secret police), when they were approached etc. But there is nothing about actual reports, like _did they do anything at all_ or not.

Even the Nobel Prize winner (2023) Karikó Katalin has a record on her yet she already wrote her autobiography years ago mentioning this, how and when she was approached and she didn't report anything at all. Now everyone have to decide on their own what to believe or not.

https://szegeder.hu/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/6c145795-f972...

Comment by Grimeton 21 hours ago

>1, this should have been released long ago cause many of these people are already dead.

Best that can happen. People will be disappointed but that's it. If the IMs are still alive it can get really ugly really quick.

Comment by christkv 14 hours ago

The rest is history just recently did two episodes of the Hungarian Revolution which I think were really good https://therestishistory.com/episodes/the-hungarian-uprising... but I’m not Hungarian obviously so i don’t know if it covers it well or not.

Comment by zsoltkacsandi 22 hours ago

“identifying up to 60,000 informants”

As far as I understand they released different kind of documents, and some of them might be agents’. But at this point I don’t think it is feasible to accurately differentiate who was agent and who only an informant.

Comment by haunter 22 hours ago

The title of the article is "up to 60,000 former agents revealed"

Comment by d1sxeyes 12 hours ago

It’s a mistranslation of the Hungarian ügynök, which can indeed mean agent, but not necessarily. Here it means informant/source.

I appreciate the title is wrong, but no reason not to add the correct context.

Comment by zsoltkacsandi 22 hours ago

Yes, and the first sentence used the word “informants”. See my comment above.

Comment by stefantalpalaru 7 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by TacticalCoder 18 hours ago

> Now everyone have to decide on their own what to believe or not.

I decide to believe that communism doesn't look like a nice system and I decide to believe that I really don't believe those saying: "this time we'll make communism work".

Comment by viraptor 15 hours ago

Watch out who you assign that idea to though. My grandfather (taking some part in local resistance) was sent to a soviet camp due to a neighbour "informant". He told the family not to bother the neighbour - the information/signatures would be likely forced in interrogation and they'd be made to confess anything that was needed. Yet that neighbour "informant" could likely end up on one of lists like this.

The lists on their own say very little about what actually happened unless you have much more context.

Comment by cucumber3732842 22 hours ago

>As a hungarian: agent would imply a member of the secret police which have already been released years ago. These are informants, regular people like students and teachers to members of the churches to actors and musicians etc.

Yes and? That they did it for free instead of for pay is supposed to make it better?

Comment by slibhb 22 hours ago

And agent is not the same as informer. Whether it's better, worse, or the same is up to you.

Comment by lukan 20 hours ago

"And agent is not the same as informer"

The difference is not really clear in reality and can get blurry quickly. Informants can also be ordered to do more active things to get information - or spread missinformation, or be ordered to do other active things. Simple things like luring a person to a party, or using their influence of position to prevent or make something happen (punish/promote a student/worker, make a certain result go away, ..).

So the majority were likely passive informants with the job of writing reports, but not all of them. And to me it rather would matter if they took the job voluntarily or were forced to do it.

Comment by wildzzz 18 hours ago

Agents vs informants is a venn diagram. Some informants become active participants under orders of an intelligence officer, they are instructed to use their access for further tasks. Some agents infiltrate groups and inform their handler on group activities and membership. Not all agents inform (they may perform things like sabotage or murder) and not all informants are instructed to do anything (they are paid and never contacted again).

Comment by wildzzz 18 hours ago

Informants are often compensated in a variety of ways. Maybe you get some cash or maybe you avoid arrest or torture in exchange for giving up someone else. Or maybe becoming an informant was a criteria for government sponsorship in academics or sports or to keep their position in a high profile career. Although some informants just do it for ego or ideological reasons. Is your neighbor annoying you with their late night clandestine meetings? Rat them out! It's unfortunate that these records don't include reasons as to why someone became an informant and what information they actually contributed, if any.

Comment by charlieyu1 10 hours ago

There are several Chinese informants caught in the last few years in Western countries, a lot was just doing it for ideological reasons, the monetary reward really doesn’t match the troubles involved and the severity of the crime

Comment by d1sxeyes 12 hours ago

That information may come in spring when the B files drop.

Comment by Shitty-kitty 15 hours ago

Many became informants because they were approached by agents asking them to tell them everything they knew about a target. Pretending to not know anything was risky. If they discovered that you didn't tell them about something you should have known, it was your ass that got sent to a re-education camp. If they as much as suspected that you were withholding information, you may have found your job suddenly relocated to some forgotten corner of the country.

If you think, i'm exaggerating. My grandfather, a prominent writer, was exiled to teach elementary school in far-off village for a few years after one of the ruling elites decided that his latest play was unsympathetic to Communist ideals.

Comment by perching_aix 21 hours ago

"i like waffles"

"oh so you HATE pancakes?!"

this is to say, no, it just means what it means. rest is all you man.

Comment by rickdeckard 20 hours ago

Your silence about ice cream is very telling...

Comment by agosz 19 hours ago

If you want to search the archives that they released: https://nyitottaktak.hu/#kereses

The article links to this site and that's the search page

Comment by rickdeckard 20 hours ago

Trying to find it, but my lack of Hungarian skill is not helping: Is there a website available to search by name or anything?

Comment by agosz 19 hours ago

https://nyitottaktak.hu/#kereses

Comment by 19 hours ago

Comment by jacquesm 19 hours ago

Interesting how long this took. Poland cleaned house almost immediately after they kicked the russians out.

Comment by orbital-decay 18 hours ago

And in Russia itself it turned out to be one of the biggest subversions: in August 1991, Yeltsin famously and inexplicably stopped his followers on their way to the KGB building where all the archives were stored. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKpEu-62BBc

Comment by holgerschurig 12 hours ago

Same in East Germany. They made a government agency on 3. October 1990. This agency collected all the files related to people from the Stasi that weren't shredded.

And then any person (east or west) could file a request "Tell me anything the Stasi knew about me". "Stasi" being the abbrev of the political secret police of east germany.

But truth be told: no one kicked the russians out. Sure, economically the FRG was "kaputt". But with a stalinist USSR they could have continued to keep the status quo. Maybe even without help: North-Korea is way more "kaputt" than east germany was. And they keep up the system since decades without soviet help. And also without much chinese help. NK is pretty isolationist, with few bridges going over the border river to China. So it's entirely possible that socialist states 1) stay in their self-selected prison due to internal forces.

It was to a good part the goodwill of the then-USSR (lead by Gorbatchev) that made the USSR troops return. I think west-german money also helped --- they asked west-germany to build housing areas in USSR for the soviet soldiers.

1) And here I mean real socialism, centered around the ideas that the "means of production" not in private hand. Uneducated US people often confuse a simple unemployment insurance with "socialism". And call countries like Denmark, Sweden or France "socialist". This only tells all of us that the general education in some countries leaves to be desired ...

Comment by jacquesm 9 hours ago

And they did a fantastic job putting shredded documents back together, that was one of the most interesting stories of the day.

Unfortunately the project seems to have stalled at the 91,000 document mark for automatic re-assembly (many more were done by hand).

Comment by lifestyleguru 8 hours ago

> Poland cleaned house almost immediately after they kicked the russians out.

lol what? Quite the opposite. Nowadays they even use the modern "techniques" to prevent information becoming public - privacy laws, and "hate speech" laws. Part of archives were torched and many highest figures kept archives in their private houses and garages. Those deepest in the structures became oligarchs during privatizations.

Comment by syngrog66 11 hours ago

good opportunity for Americans now especially to understand the different tiers of foreign operatives within any given country:

1. an agent (James Bond is the canonical example)

2. an asset

3. a useful idiot

The trick is that sometimes its harder to tell which flavor a particular individual best fits, at least from the outside with insufficient data. Some we might assume are agents/assets might be merely useful idiots, or vice versa.

Comment by jacquesm 9 hours ago

Assets are more often than not not aware that they are assets.

Comment by syngrog66 4 hours ago

an asset who is not aware is merely a useful idiot

Comment by polloxtroy 6 hours ago

AmericanStasi.com suggests a modern program run by Israel is quite quite active in the West including the US.

Comment by expedition32 22 hours ago

One thing I noticed is that Eastern Europe is always quick to blame the Soviets for their communist dictatorships conveniently forgetting the millions of "fellow travellers" along the way.

Comment by dwroberts 22 hours ago

Hungary had a revolution against Soviet control that was brutally suppressed and hundreds of thousands of people fled or were exiled. So yes, the Soviets were absolutely responsible for their communist dictatorship because they killed or removed anyone that did not comply

Comment by aliasxneo 21 hours ago

I don't know why the ignorance level of what happened in some of these countries during these years is so high. Seriously, did they just stop teaching it at some point? I don't get it.

Comment by asdff 20 hours ago

They don’t teach this in american school at least until you get to undergrad and can pick them as electives. History class usually stops after wwii. Mine didn’t even cover past wwi.

Comment by robswc 17 hours ago

I think its mostly because;

- Nazis were worse, and Soviets fought Nazis so they get a bit of a break

- It isn't convenient to for some narratives. (The idea that leftism is immune from authoritarianism).

Comment by AngryData 21 hours ago

If they teach about it people might be able to identify the actual problems of authoritarianism and having an elite class. Rather than throwing any and everything they don't like under the communist label.

Comment by aliasxneo 20 hours ago

Hungary is a particularly interesting case. Failed a populist uprising in 1919. Then failed again in 1945 when the Independent Smallholders’ Party won a clear majority over the communist party. Then came the "salami tactics" (secret police arrests/killings under accusations of "fascism" or conspiracy) until the "election" in 1949 which just ended up being straight down the party line (after they merged with the socialists). Not to mention the Red Army never really left after the end of WWII.

It's not the typical story people usually think about with either a populist uprising or the Red Terror.

Comment by noir_lord 18 hours ago

They also came quite close to succeeding, initially it looked like the Politburo would actually remove Soviet troops and let much of what they wanted to happen happen.

Then Khrushchev and the rest decided that if they let Hungary "go" they'd have a problem justifying to the people of the other not entirely willing Warsaw Pact countries why they couldn't also go.

(Dramatically simplifying for brevity), it was also a really bad time for it to happen because we (the British), French and Israeli’s decided to start a massive crisis in the middle east 2 days earlier which over shadowed events in Hungary.

My missus is Hungarian, god help you if you say that Hungary was in the USSR to her because no one else will.

Her family (and her father in particular) loathed the Hungarian Communist Party but he was something of an Anglophile which he passed on to her and indirectly that worked out for me, so when Hungary joined the EU/combined with the Hungarian government saying "If you don't like it leave" (summarising again) she decided to say "OK" and move to the UK.

Comment by RussianBot9580 17 hours ago

If they teach about it some people might realize that many a politician in the EU - the ones who are loudest about the evils of the Soviets - have parents who were high ranking members of the Politburo, and they owe their current position to said parents.

Comment by mopsi 7 hours ago

Interesting. Can you name some?

Comment by WarmWash 20 hours ago

The soviets steamed rolled any opposition, but let's not forget that there were tons of people who were cheering for unsympathetic communism before the fact.

Comment by mmooss 20 hours ago

The Soviets certainly were a significant factor but that doesn't tell us how much Hungarians contributed. Not everyone in Hungary revolted; no doubt many cooperated.

But I don't mean to dismiss the courage of those who did revolt. Not only does it inspire others (I'm sure the Prague Spring was inspired by it, and others later), it changed how the world looked at the Soviet Union and their relationships with the Eastern European countries they dominated.

Comment by fsckboy 12 hours ago

>Hungary had a revolution against Soviet control that was brutally suppressed

The "Prague Spring" was not what is generally described as a revolution, hence its "poetic" name. It was people's protests and Hungarian government acceptance/compromise/accomodation that loosened the strictures the people lived under

The Soviet Union did send in troops to undo these changes, and it was brutal, there just was not an insurrection underway.

Comment by kyusan0 9 hours ago

"Prague Spring" was in 1968 and has absolutely nothing to do with Hungary, notably due to being the capital city of a whole other country.

The Hungarian revolution we're talking about happened in 1956, was intended to make Hungary leave the Warsaw pact altogether, and was indeed brutally suppressed.

Comment by enaaem 21 hours ago

And that's exactly where the term 'tankie' comes from.

Comment by throwaway27448 15 hours ago

The term tankie originates in describing western supporters of the soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia

Comment by dralley 13 hours ago

Hungary was much of the same, though, and roughly the same vintage.

Comment by pessimizer 17 hours ago

But the Soviets, under Stalin, also killed all the far left-wing socialists and communists. The right like to pretend like the Soviets under Stalin were the poster child for communism and "leftism" when they considered non-ComIntern/ComInform left-wingers their greatest threat and enemy. "Social Fascists."

And the big right-wing anticommunists who took over everywhere after the Soviet Union's fall were just former communist party functionaries who became looters, and then decided that private property was actually the most important thing to protect after they had all of it.

The Soviets were absolutely responsible for the Stalinist dictatorship which everyone in the Soviet Union was under, it wasn't just some imposition on colonies. But being a communist who wasn't loyal got you killed a lot quicker than being a capitalist who was.

Comment by lazide 13 hours ago

Bonus points - what ‘loyal’ looked like changed pretty randomly and scarily with zero warning.

Comment by fithisux 11 hours ago

You conveniently ignore that "innocent" Hungary was a member of the Axis in WWII and participated in the bloodshed of Stalingrad.

Soviets were right to intervene.

Comment by dwroberts 10 hours ago

It is well understood that Hungary supported the Axis forces because it wanted its WW1 territories back. They were not considered a reliable ally (or all-in on the Nazi cause) that is why Germany eventually occupied them

Comment by holgerschurig 12 hours ago

First thing: I've been born in West Germany and never thought that communism or real socialism (i.E. not what many right-wing US americans now call "socialism") is a good system. A part of this came probably because both of my parents fleed the east german socialist system when "the wall" hasn't yet fully hermetically closed.

So I know that the east german socialistic system would have NEVER been erected wouldn't the area have not been occupied by socialist troops. USSR first trained the political cadres. And later controlled them. It was their presence that backed their might. At the 17. June of 1953 it were russian tanks that squelched the uprising. Similar use happened e.g. in the "czech spring" and at other occurrences.

And still we all know that it was german people that executed this as well. From high profile ones like Ulbricht or Honecker or Mielke down to the polical commissars in the combinats. Germans.

And then we know that the east-german "Stasi" (secret political police) was blown out of proportion: they had 91015 members. Germans.

And we also know that the Stasi had lots of informations, IM "Informelle Mitarbeiter". 189000 in total. Germans.

So yes, my guess is that about 10% of the east german population was actively supporting the system. And this is not a singular meaning here, we all know that a good amount of germans suppressed germans. No one here is trying to shift it solely on the USSR. Not even members of the former SED (socialist union party).

I don't know where you've got the information about "always quick to blame", but I can say that for the FRG/GDR situation it is not really true.

As for your term "millions": that is actually true. Above I wrote about 198000 polical informations. But the SED (the socialist "union" party) had 2.1 million members. And then there were people members in the socialist "union" but not in the party. And so on... so yes, the support basis was quite high. This is why I assume that 10% actively supported the system (and, more or less, oppressed others). The GDR had 18.8 (1945) to 16.4 (1989) million people.

Comment by UpsideDownRide 11 hours ago

What do you even mean. There were literal soviet troops stationed. Czech Republic and Hungary had tanks rolling in during dissent attempts.

Being caught planning against the puppet regimes meant death early on, gulags bit later on. So some people did conform, can't be expecting everyone to want to sacrifice their lives instead of trying to survive.

As soon as USSR collapsed Eastern Europe started moving away from the Russian system. Not in a spotless manner but what else do you really need to see that the system was imposed from outside?

Comment by renw0rp 21 hours ago

You are right, we should be blaming Americans and British for selling us in Yalta.

Comment by mandevil 15 hours ago

Eastern Europe wasn't something that the Americans and British could give away, it was the hard work of the Soviet Army (and many bad choices by Hitler) that ensured that Hungary would be on the Soviet sphere of control. Churchill did agree to the Percentages Agreement (there is no evidence that FDR ever learned about it) at the Moscow Conference in October 1944, but even that was already too late, it was merely an acceptance of something that Stalin already had.

Stalin seems, per _Yalta_ by Plokhy, to have tried to keep Poland and France balanced against each other. In June 1944 de Gaulle set up the GPRF for France, and a few weeks later the PKWN ("Lublin Government") was set up for Poland. Both started out as broad-front governments that combined Communist and Capitalist forces to fight the Nazis, and then over the course until 1945-6, when the Fourth Republic and the TRJN were created after the war ended, more normalized governments were created again combining both elements, and then lasting a few more years until the weaker side in both governments- in both cases the side not allied with the armies that liberated them- were finally fully purged from the Government. That was 1947 for Poland and 1949 for France.

Basically, I think that the absolute best case the Western Allies could have gotten, if this was their most important goal (which it was not for either FDR or WSC), was some sort of Finlandization of all of Europe. But I think it's very unlikely that Stalin would have accepted that- he demanded buffer space for the USSR, he wanted to loot all the factories etc. of Europe to help the USSR rebuild. He wasn't inclined to trust "oh they'll all be neutral in the future." And the only card that FDR and WSC actually had, as far as I can tell, was to start a massive war while World War Two continued in the Pacific. We know that VJ day followed VE day by only a few months, but no one at Yalta expected that, they fully expected Japan to last until 1946 or maybe even 1947. FDR's most important goal at that conference was to get Stalin to fully commit to war against Japan, he's not going to threaten war with the USSR over Eastern Europe. And absent the threat of war, I don't see any negotiation tactic that FDR and WSC could use to free Hungary. Like I said, if Stalin was feeling surprisingly weak, maybe the West could have traded West Germany+Low Countries+France+Italy being fully demilitarized and forcibly neutral for the same in Eastern Europe, but I don't think it was possible to reach that agreement and I think it would have been a bad trade if they could.

After the war, Churchill blamed FDR for selling Eastern Europe out at Yalta because he wanted to hide the "Percentages Agreement"- which again was purely a UK-USSR agreement with no evidence that FDR ever knew about it- after the Cold War started. But the last German defenders of Budapest surrendered only a day or two after the end of the Yalta conference, Soviet domination of Hungary was locked in long before that meeting.

Comment by bell-cot 21 hours ago

General Soviet policy for areas where "everybody" resisted their yoke was to kill off everybody. Purists in comfy philosophy classrooms are free to argue whether or not that is the morally optimal outcome.

Comment by tehjoker 19 hours ago

Proof please.

Comment by aliasxneo 17 hours ago

Assuming you're not trolling, you should really dig in more. They basically had it down to a science - what with the execution rooms with the chair and slot, blood draining into the floor, pre-dug mass graves, etc.

Comment by holgerschurig 11 hours ago

Actually, the question for proof is valid. The poster claimed

> where "everybody" resisted their yoke was to kill off everybody

and okay, the everybody is in quotation marks. Which indicates that this doesn't mean 100%. But how much is "everybody"? If he doesn't owe us a proof for that claim, he owes us a clarification.

In some soviet satellite states, the soviet occupation zones killed way less than 100% who resisted. There are studies that in East Germany about those early opponents to the socialist systems (e.g. to the seizing of capital, farmers land, the cleansing of the universities and schools etc). They took 100% of the opponents in custody. And a good amount of non-opponents, there was no real proof of guilty needed. About 30% of the people of the inmates died in those 4 years of soviet occupation.

To me, this is certainly not "where EVERYBODY resisted their yoke was to KILL off everybody". But it was still cruel, still a stalinist forced occupation, a theft of an extremely large scale.

And so, if someone states such a general stand ... he would have to go forward with proofs. And that's a question of science, logical reasoning. Not if your political stance is extremist left or not.

Comment by tehjoker 13 hours ago

Sounds like you could be talking about America. Have you ever read about what we did in Vietnam, Korea, or Indonesia? Or what we did to Black or Indigenous people?

That's millions and millions of bodies. Capitalism isn't pretty.

Comment by WarmWash 5 hours ago

Can you give an example from history of a role model nation?

Comment by UpsideDownRide 11 hours ago

Capitalism isn't pretty. Soviet style communism is even worse.

Comment by aliasxneo 12 hours ago

Just out of curiosity, what implores you to ask me those questions? Considering I said nothing about any of those topics. It feels like a weird reaction to suddenly make this about capitalism vs communism.

But I suppose I'll engage despite it being hard to take your confusion about America seriously. In places such as the Lubyanka basement, Butovo firing range, and other NKVD sites, prisoners were often shot in the back of the head while standing or seated. Some facilities had drainage systems or chutes. Bodies were trucked to pre-prepared mass graves (Katyn, Kurapaty, Bykivnia, and many others). This was part of a deliberate system of class-based and political terror: the Red Terror under Lenin, the Great Purge, dekulakization, the Holodomor, and the gulag system.

If you can show me where in history America implemented this system, such that you could honestly be confused whether I was talking about Russia or America, I would be truly impressed.

Comment by tehjoker 3 hours ago

It is interesting how people fail to conceptualize the terror imposed on Black and native people as happening "to us". It shows how effective U.S. propaganda has been at framing the national body and dismissing people as "others" deserving of harsh treatment.

Comment by aliasxneo 2 hours ago

I noticed you didn't provide anything that would constitute a counter-argument. Have you considered people might not take what you say seriously because of that? The word "people" in your sentence is vague and seems to be a generalized ad-hominem attack, probably intending to categorize myself in it - despite you having absolutely no evidence to back it up. This level of ignorance is not going to help your cause. It's quite possible to abhor the atrocities of the red terror and American slavery, as I do. What I do _not_ do is play revisionist and pretend like America has ever setup such a precise killing machine as the Soviets did in the 20th century.

Comment by holgerschurig 11 hours ago

Well, if I relax "killed" to be "oppressed" then we have tons of proof on this. Before the east german GDR was errected, it was 4 years a soviet occupied zone. It was during this time that e.g. all the farmers land was seized, the the SMAD errected a system of "pre-censorship", that they "washed" the teachers, that they demontaged most of the companies, that they seized the money from banks and companies and so on.

And don't you think that there was no opposition. Many farmers, living on and from the land of their parents grandparents (etc, lasting generations back) were really tied to their land. So they were repressed, often with made-up claims, a political process and than jail. But sometimes with death (death penalty existed under soviet occupation). But not only farmers were persecuted on opposition, also company owners and managers.

122671 germans were "captured" --- and I mean it. Often relatives weren't told about the accusation or where they were injailed. Some came to normal jails, but 42889 died while in custody. That's such a high percentage that one cannot assume normal die reasons. Studies estimate that 1% of the population was arrested and 30% of the arresed died due to "circumstances".

And we know that even after the soviet occupation turned into the founding of east germany (GDR) that the east-german secret police, Stasi, occassionally killed political opponents by firing squads.

So, for the oppressed population it was known that anyone who opposes would be taken away with unknown destination. And that a good amount of them never returned.

And keep in mind that this was just after the Nazi time. Non-german people always focus on how the Nazis killed Jews. And they are totally right ... but they ALSO tortured and killed political opponents. So for a german in 1949 it was not unknown to some political police arriving at 4 o clock in the morning and taking you to some torture camp. You didn't need to be a jew, gypsi or Jehova's Witness. Just the rumor that you opposed the system was enough.

It was a climate of feat. And the soviets and later the leading east germans continued that.

Comment by surfingdino 19 hours ago

One example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre

Comment by Muromec 16 hours ago

You aren't doing communism any good by whitewashing r*ian crimes from soviet time

Comment by 086425890653 15 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by fithisux 11 hours ago

Is this another Hollywood CIA funded production? Release date on Netflix please.