Hungary prepares to release Communist-era records revealing state security agents and informants

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungary will soon release tens of thousands of records previously restricted to broad public access that identify people listed by the Communist-era state security services as officers, informants, collaborators or recruitment targets during Hungary's 20th-century dictatorship.

The country , which peacefully transitioned to democracy in 1990 as the Soviet Union crumbled, spent more than four decades under Communist rule during which a sprawling state security apparatus closely monitored citizens and their loyalty to the socialist government.

The security service, in addition to its established agents and officers, recruited private citizens, often through blackmail or under other types of duress, to monitor their coworkers, friends, neighbors and relatives, and to report on them to their handlers.

The upcoming release of the files, which the Historical Archives of the State Security Services said on Tuesday will occur in two phases beginning on Nov. 4, is part of a push by Hungary's new center-right government to introduce more transparency in the workings of the state.

Following a news conference at the archive on Tuesday, Gergő Bendegúz Cseh, the archive's director-general, told The Associated Press that the question of whether to release the files has been contentious since Hungary's democratic transition 36 years ago — largely, he said, because their release would likely have implicated acting politicians.

“This is an old debate. Hungarian society has not been able to swallow or spit out this problem since the change of regime,” Cseh said.

But shortly after his Tisza party defeated former Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán in a landslide election in April, Prime Minister Péter Magyar , 45, said that his new government would “fulfill one of the most important promises of the democratic transition: we will make the existing records public and searchable.”

Previously only available to close relatives of those named in the records and to researchers, the files — which the archive estimates contain around 50,000-60,000 names — will be available through a searchable, online database.

Users will be able to request information on security officers, informants or recruitment targets based on their name, date or place of birth, mother’s name, code name and document type or number.

Some documents will be redacted to protect sensitive personal information, including health records, addictions, sexual activity and sexual orientation. Expecting heavy traffic on the site, the archive has outsourced the database to external servers to avoid overloading its own.

A second wave of releases is scheduled to occur on Feb. 25, when about 9,000 “B dossiers” — files running up to hundreds of pages each detailing individual recruits or recruitment targets — will be made public.

Cseh, the archive’s director, said that successor governments to dictatorships rarely disclose the names of previous agents and informants, let alone records as detailed as those Hungary is preparing to release.

“Such radical disclosures have never happened anywhere before,” Cseh said. “Now we can really understand who were the secret collaborators or informants of the state security.”