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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

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...

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>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.

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.

“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.

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

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

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.

> 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".

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.

>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?

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

"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.

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).

"i like waffles"

"oh so you HATE pancakes?!"

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

Your silence about ice cream is very telling...

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.

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.

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

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

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