Hungary opens communist-era secret police files to the public, with around 60,000 names released

Hungary has opened communist-era secret police files to the public, in a move the government says will help Hungarian society heal from the traumas of 45 years of communist rule.

The files were released on Wednesday. The release was part of a campaign promise by Prime Minister Péter Magyar.

The date of the opening is symbolic. On 4 November 1956, Soviet tanks rolled through Budapest and other cities to crush Hungary's short-lived revolution.

Speaking to reporters at the state archives in Budapest, Prime Minister Péter Magyar said: "I ask everyone to treat this long overdue publication of documents with dignity and humanity."

He added: "Many families will now face difficult information, often related to a deceased relative. It is impossible to process a trauma without discussion and asking questions."

According to Magyar, the move fulfils a promise made by those who toppled the Communist party in Hungary in 1989. In the ensuing decades, conservative, Socialist-Liberal and Fidesz-led governments all contemplated opening the files but ultimately refused.

Since 1998, it has been possible to apply for your own file, and for historians to research those of others. But many names were blacked out, and many files were withheld by the post-communist secret services for their own use.

Over the past 36 years, there have been frequent leaks of data from the files, as successive governments tried to damage their opponents. Many files were also shredded as the Communist party lost its grip in 1988-89.

From Wednesday, the names and personal data of around 60,000 people recruited by the communist-era secret services have become available on the nyitottaktak.hu website. So-called Form 6 cards have been released, while the B-dossiers detailing recruitment registers will come next February.

A typical entry records the informer's real name, their codename, date of birth, address and mother's name, their motive for recruitment — whether voluntary or because they were blackmailed or coerced — and the name of their handling officer.

Around 150,000 to 160,000 people are estimated to have been recruited as informers in Hungary between December 1944 and February 1990. Many were blackmailed with threats including loss of work or study opportunities and loss of access to medicines; such intimate details will be carefully edited out of the current disclosures too.

Krisztian Ungváry, a historian who has long campaigned for the full release of the files, says access to information on what is recorded by the state against the citizen is a citizen's right, and should not depend on the whims of those in power.

An opponent of the move, Zsuzsanna Borvendég, a historian and MEP of the far-right Our Homeland party, told Hungarian media that publishing the names of informers without fully explaining the circumstances of their recruitment and their activities risks misleading the public.