Hungary: Communist-era files released, up to 60k former agents revealed
euronews.com
euronews.com
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...
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.
I appreciate the title is wrong, but no reason not to add the correct context.
Yes and? That they did it for free instead of for pay is supposed to make it better?
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.
"oh so you HATE pancakes?!"
this is to say, no, it just means what it means. rest is all you man.
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.
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.
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".
The lists on their own say very little about what actually happened unless you have much more context.
The article links to this site and that's the search page
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 ...
Unfortunately the project seems to have stalled at the 91,000 document mark for automatic re-assembly (many more were done by hand).
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.
Ve called them "political turncoaters" (převlékači kabátů).
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.
It's not the typical story people usually think about with either a populist uprising or the Red Terror.
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.
- 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Soviets were right to intervene.
Germany occupied Hungary because Kállay secretly tried to negotiate a separate end to hostilities between Soviet Union and Hungary.
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.
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.
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?