Hungary opens communist-era state-security records

Hungary opened a searchable online database of communist-era state-security records on November 4, making digitised files available to the public for the first time. The launch of Nyitottaktak.hu fulfills a pledge by Prime Minister Péter Magyar’s government and coincides with the 70th anniversary of the Soviet crackdown on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security Services (ÁBTL) said the initial release covers records concerning roughly 50,000 to 60,000 people linked to the communist security apparatus. The database includes people in different roles, including officers and handlers, recruited informants and, in some cases, people monitored by the services. The estimate is not a count of confirmed informers. Users can search digitised records using identifying information such as names, birth details, addresses, codenames and document type. The archive has published three categories of records. It is preparing a further group of about 9,000 individual recruitment files for publication by February 25, 2027, after digitising the documents and removing protected personal information. A database entry alone does not establish that a...