Hungary to publish communist‑era informant names, confront past

Hungary will publish a searchable online database naming tens of thousands of state informants who spied for the communist-era security services between 1945 and 1989, with the release scheduled for 4 November. The government passed a law in September to enable the publication after Péter Magyar vowed during the April election campaign to open the files; polls cited in the report said more than two thirds of Hungarians backed the move. The archive material, long kept in the basement of the Historical Archives of the State Security Services, contains an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 names; historians estimate about 10 percent of those named are still alive. Archivist István Papp said the release will make Hungary’s former state-service records among the most transparent in the former eastern bloc, but he warned many dossiers are incomplete. Some files were destroyed during the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising and others vanished around the 1989 transition, so motivations and the extent of reporting will often remain unclear. Miklós Kiss, president of an association for victims and a survivor of a forced labour camp, said earlier publication would have settled the issue long ago. The publication follows other postcommunist disclosures such as East Germany’s 1992 opening of Stasi records, the Czech Republic’s 2003 release, and Latvia’s 2018 publication; the immediate effect will be families and researchers confronting specific names and records when the database goes live on 4 November.