Hungary has released tens of thousands of communist-era secret police files in a searchable online database, opening a window onto the vast informer network used to spy on citizens during decades of one-party rule. The portal, nyitottaktak.hu, went live on 4 November, exactly 70 years after Soviet tanks crushed Hungary's 1956 uprising.

The first release names around 50,000 to 60,000 people linked to the former state security services between 1945 and 1989. It includes registration cards, a recruitment register covering 1957 to 1962, and a database of agents' personal details and code names. Historians estimate that around 150,000 people were recruited into the network, but many files were destroyed during the 1956 uprising and again as communist rule collapsed in 1988-89, so the surviving records are incomplete.

Prime Minister Peter Magyar, whose government passed the disclosure law in September, described the release as keeping a promise made at Hungary's democratic transition in 1990. "We are implementing now, after 36 years, what was the promise of the change of regime," he told a briefing at the Historical Archives of the State Security Services in Budapest.

The archives have warned that a name in the database does not prove a person willingly informed on others, and that the records may not be accurate in every case. More detailed recruitment dossiers for around 9,000 people are scheduled for publication on 25 February 2027, the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Communism.

The release has already stirred controversy. Hungary's Catholic Bishops' Conference issued an extraordinary statement on the same afternoon, admitting that some members of the Church had genuinely collaborated with the dictatorship, passing confidential information about fellow Catholics to the authorities. Questions have also been raised about Bishop Laszlo Kiss-Rigo of Szeged-Csanad, one of the names in the newly published records.