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haunter 7 hours ago [-]
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.
>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.
zsoltkacsandi 7 hours ago [-]
“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.
haunter 7 hours ago [-]
The title of the article is "up to 60,000 former agents revealed"
zsoltkacsandi 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, and the first sentence used the word “informants”. See my comment above.
TacticalCoder 3 hours ago [-]
> 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".
cucumber3732842 7 hours ago [-]
>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?
slibhb 7 hours ago [-]
And agent is not the same as informer. Whether it's better, worse, or the same is up to you.
lukan 5 hours ago [-]
"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.
wildzzz 3 hours ago [-]
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).
wildzzz 3 hours ago [-]
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.
perching_aix 6 hours ago [-]
"i like waffles"
"oh so you HATE pancakes?!"
this is to say, no, it just means what it means. rest is all you man.
Interesting how long this took. Poland cleaned house almost immediately after they kicked the russians out.
orbital-decay 3 hours ago [-]
And in Russia itself it turned out to be one of the biggest subversions: in August 1991, Yeltsin famously and inexplicably stopped his followers on their way to the KGB building where all the archives were stored. [1]
One thing I noticed is that Eastern Europe is always quick to blame the Soviets for their communist dictatorships conveniently forgetting the millions of "fellow travellers" along the way.
dwroberts 7 hours ago [-]
Hungary had a revolution against Soviet control that was brutally suppressed and hundreds of thousands of people fled or were exiled. So yes, the Soviets were absolutely responsible for their communist dictatorship because they killed or removed anyone that did not comply
aliasxneo 6 hours ago [-]
I don't know why the ignorance level of what happened in some of these countries during these years is so high. Seriously, did they just stop teaching it at some point? I don't get it.
asdff 5 hours ago [-]
They don’t teach this in american school at least until you get to undergrad and can pick them as electives. History class usually stops after wwii. Mine didn’t even cover past wwi.
robswc 2 hours ago [-]
I think its mostly because;
- 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).
AngryData 6 hours ago [-]
If they teach about it people might be able to identify the actual problems of authoritarianism and having an elite class. Rather than throwing any and everything they don't like under the communist label.
aliasxneo 5 hours ago [-]
Hungary is a particularly interesting case. Failed a populist uprising in 1919. Then failed again in 1945 when the Independent Smallholders’ Party won a clear majority over the communist party. Then came the "salami tactics" (secret police arrests/killings under accusations of "fascism" or conspiracy) until the "election" in 1949 which just ended up being straight down the party line (after they merged with the socialists). Not to mention the Red Army never really left after the end of WWII.
It's not the typical story people usually think about with either a populist uprising or the Red Terror.
noir_lord 3 hours ago [-]
They also came quite close to succeeding, initially it looked like the Politburo would actually remove Soviet troops and let much of what they wanted to happen happen.
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.
RussianBot9580 2 hours ago [-]
If they teach about it some people might realize that many a politician in the EU - the ones who are loudest about the evils of the Soviets - have parents who were high ranking members of the Politburo, and they owe their current position to said parents.
WarmWash 5 hours ago [-]
The soviets steamed rolled any opposition, but let's not forget that there were tons of people who were cheering for unsympathetic communism before the fact.
mmooss 5 hours ago [-]
The Soviets certainly were a significant factor but that doesn't tell us how much Hungarians contributed. Not everyone in Hungary revolted; no doubt many cooperated.
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.
enaaem 6 hours ago [-]
And that's exactly where the term 'tankie' comes from.
throwaway27448 17 minutes ago [-]
The term tankie originates in describing western supporters of the soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia
pessimizer 2 hours ago [-]
But the Soviets, under Stalin, also killed all the far left-wing socialists and communists. The right like to pretend like the Soviets under Stalin were the poster child for communism and "leftism" when they considered non-ComIntern/ComInform left-wingers their greatest threat and enemy. "Social Fascists."
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.
renw0rp 6 hours ago [-]
You are right, we should be blaming Americans and British for selling us in Yalta.
mandevil 9 minutes ago [-]
Eastern Europe wasn't something that the Americans and British could give away, it was the hard work of the Soviet Army (and many bad choices by Hitler) that ensured that Hungary would be on the Soviet sphere of control. Churchill did agree to the Percentages Agreement (there is no evidence that FDR ever learned about it) at the Moscow Conference in October 1944, but even that was already too late, it was merely an acceptance of something that Stalin already had.
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.
bell-cot 6 hours ago [-]
General Soviet policy for areas where "everybody" resisted their yoke was to kill off everybody. Purists in comfy philosophy classrooms are free to argue whether or not that is the morally optimal outcome.
tehjoker 4 hours ago [-]
Proof please.
aliasxneo 2 hours ago [-]
Assuming you're not trolling, you should really dig in more. They basically had it down to a science - what with the execution rooms with the chair and slot, blood draining into the floor, pre-dug mass graves, etc.
Muromec 40 minutes ago [-]
You aren't doing communism any good by whitewashing r*ian crimes from soviet time
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...
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.
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 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".
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.
The article links to this site and that's the search page
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKpEu-62BBc
- 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).
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.
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.
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.