Remember, remember the 4th of November

By Dan Galambos
At dawn on November 4th, 1956, artillery rudely woke Budapest. Soviet tanks were rolling into the city from several directions, and by dusk the revolution that had begun just 12 days earlier was being crushed in the same streets we walk to class today. It is easy to perceive 1956 as remote history. It is not that easy to do that while living in Budapest, as bullet scars are still visible on apartment buildings around Corvin köz in District VIII, where young fighters, many of them teenagers, held off the Soviets with rifles and Molotov cocktails. The Corvin Cinema, their stronghold, still sells movie tickets.
On Oct. 23, 1956, university students, some of whom studied at the Technical University, had drafted a list of 16 demands, marched through the city calling for free press, free elections, and the withdrawal of Soviet troops. That evening, masses gathered at the giant Stalin statue near City Park, and then fighting broke out at the Hungarian Radio building on Bródy Sándor utca.
For a few days, it looked as if they had won. Prime Minister Imre Nagy announced that Hungary would leave the Warsaw Pact. Then came November 4th. Early that morning, Nagy went on the radio to announce that Soviet troops had attacked the capital. Within days, any form of organized resistance had collapsed. Around 2,500 Hungarians were killed, and roughly 200,000 fled the country. Nagy was later tried in secret and executed in 1958. What followed was three decades of a quieter kind of control. Under János Kádár, the regime relied less on tanks and more on informers: neighbors, coworkers, classmates, and sometimes family members reporting to the state security services.
Fast-forward to the present. Starting Wednesday, November 4th, 2026, the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security Services will launch Nyitottaktak.hu, a free public database. Over two phases, it will publish roughly 50,000 files naming people that the secret police listed as informants, officers, collaborators, or recruitment targets, searchable by personal details. The second release on Feb. 25 is expected to add about 9,000 so-called B dossiers, which are very detailed files on individual and personal agents that can be up to hundreds of pages.
The release was originally planned for the October 23rd anniversary, but ended up being pushed back to release on the day the tanks arrived. It follows a law passed by parliament in September and fulfills a pledge by Prime Minister Péter Magyar. Gergő Bendegúz Cseh, the archive’s director, says no other former communist state has gone this far, including Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic. It has been a long wait. Communist rule ended in 1989, but subsequent governments never fully opened the archives. Even the Fidesz lawmakers voted down disclosure proposals at least 30 times. Researchers expect that almost every Hungarian will find someone affected among their family or friends, and that many will face difficult conversations. Not everyone thinks the files will deliver justice; for example, historian Krisztián Ungváry has made it clear he doesn’t expect them to neatly divide the Kádár era into perpetrators and victims, since many informers were pressured or blackmailed into cooperating. Many people feel that the officers who recruited and intimidated informers deserve more scrutiny than the informers themselves.
For all the international students in Budapest, the year 1956 can feel like nothing but a chapter in a textbook, but the revolution was started by people our age, in the neighborhoods where we live, study, and go out at night. On Wednesday, flags across the city will fly at half-staff, and for the first time, the names behind the quiet decades that followed will be a click away.