By asahifile 
At ten o’clock on Wednesday morning a Hungarian website called nyitottaktak.hu became searchable. It lists the names, codenames, addresses, recruitment motives and handling officers of roughly 60,000 people who worked for the communist-era state security services. Prime Minister Péter Magyar announced it at the archives in Budapest, on the seventieth anniversary of the day Soviet tanks entered the capital to crush the 1956 uprising. The B-dossiers, which describe what those people actually did, are due on 25 February 2027.
What went online, and what it does not say
A typical entry is a personnel card, not a confession. It establishes that a name sat in a registry; it does not establish what the person reported, to whom, how often, or whether anyone believed them. Some fields are withheld deliberately, including details about sexual orientation. Anyone opening the site expecting a verdict on a grandfather will find a filing cabinet instead.
Three denominators that do not agree
Magyar says about 60,000 names are now public. The archives estimate that some 150,000 people were recruited as informers between December 1944 and February 1990. Sixty thousand against 150,000 is 40 per cent: two in five of everyone the archives believe was on the books.
A second denominator contradicts that. Agency reporting, citing the same archives, says records survive for only about a third of the 150,000 — roughly 50,000 files. Publish 60,000 names drawn from 50,000 surviving records and the release is 120 per cent of the paper. Both are official estimates and both cannot be exact. The likeliest reading: 150,000 is a soft estimate of recruitment, a third a soft estimate of survival, and nobody reconciled them before a figure went into a press release. What is checkable is narrower: 60,000 named records today, about 9,000 upgraded in February, which is 46 per cent of the largest denominator on offer.
The 543-month clock
The recruitment window runs from December 1944 to February 1990: 543 months, 16,525 days. Spread evenly, 60,000 names would be 110 a month and 3.6 a day. They were not spread evenly: the networks grew in the early 1950s and after 1956, and the paper was thinned twice, during the uprising and again in 1988–89. The average still fixes the scale of a search: a small town’s worth of names, not a country’s. From 4 November 1956 to this week is seventy years to the day; from 1998, when Hungarians could first request their own file, it is twenty-eight years of access behind a counter; to 25 February 2027 it is 113 days.
A timeline that disagrees about its own length
Magyar says the promise is being kept “after 36 years”, counting from the 1990 first free election. Other reports say 37, counting from 1989. At least one broadcaster’s headline says 47, which matches nothing in the record. The BBC describes “45 years of communist rule”; agency copy says “four decades”; the window the BBC itself publishes, December 1944 to February 1990, is 45 years and three months. None of this changes what happened on Wednesday, but it changes how to measure it, because the case for urgency has always been actuarial: the people who can be named, and the people who can read the names, are dying.
What the names can and cannot prove
Krisztián Ungváry, a historian who campaigned for release for years, calls it a citizen’s right: what the state recorded about you should not depend on who holds office. His critic Zsuzsanna Borvendég, an MEP for Our Homeland, argues that in most surviving agent reports it is not even possible to identify the agent, let alone the motive. Archivists add that appearing in the database does not prove someone actively worked as an informer.
Which yields a conditional verdict. If the question is whether a specific person was registered with the political police, the database answers it, within the redactions. If the question is what they did, what they were paid, or whether a handler thought them useless, the answer arrives in February at the earliest and possibly never. If the question is how many Hungarians informed, no file answers it: 60,000 names today, up to 150,000 by estimate, an unknown share of the paper destroyed.
What to watch
- 25 February 2027. The B-dossiers land with recruitment detail. That is when this stops being a name list.
- The 9,000. Watch whether the second batch is 9,000 names or 9,000 files; coverage has used the terms interchangeably.
- Durability. The database is an executive act. Watch whether access is written into law strongly enough to survive a change of government.
Wednesday did not answer a historical question. Hungary published its list of questions, with the missing paper visible in the footnotes.
Sources: Reuters, BBC News, DW, AFP, Geo News. All ratios and intervals are this site’s own arithmetic.