Websites, databases
Website of the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security: www.abtl.hu
As a result of the IT developments of recent years, citizens can now fully access their own records online, and the vast majority of research is now also carried out electronically via the internet.
Websites related to the work of the archives:
Virtual exhibitions:
56 Graffiti
The prize-winner works of the invitational fine art competition for art schools can be viewed under the title ’56 graffiti’. The images reflect how young people see and visualise the days of the 1956 revolution.
The first free “selection”
Posters of the political transformation with state security documents
The exhibition takes us back to the pivotal historical events in the 1990s. In 1990, after more than four decades, free parliamentary elections were held in Hungary followed by municipal elections. During the election campaigns Budapest, the capital showed an unprecedented face: the city was full of posters of parties competing for votes. The virtual exhibition was completed for the 30th anniversary of the first free elections and it revives the atmosphere of the public places in Budapest and of a country burning with the fever of the changes through contemporary posters, leaflets, photos, newspapers and archival documents.
“This freedom is not that freedom”
Rallies and demonstrations in the light of state security documents 1988-1989
The last hours of the one-party dictatorship were marked by several events with symbolic content, most often demonstrations. We highlighted some of the events at the exhibition, the ones demonstrating the process of transition from 1988 to 1989 and the relations between the political police and society. With the help of archival documents, leaflets, contemporary photos and videos the virtual exhibition revives the March 15th demonstrations and the protest rallies against the Bős-Nagymaros water dam, the commemorative demonstration and rally on the 30th anniversary of the execution of Imre Nagy and his accociates on 16th June 1998. Visitors can follow both the events of the reburial of Imre Nagy and his associates and János Kádár’s funeral in 1989 as well as protest rallies against the Romanian village systematisation in 1988 or the demonstration sympathising with the Romanian revolution of 1989.
Miner-files from the Rákosi Era
Hungarian coal mining was a key industry branch in the post-war reconstruction and one of the beneficiaries of the investment policy of the gradually emerging communist dictatorship after World War II. At the same time the mining industry was also a victim of a growing turf war suspicion and an economic policy that disregarded the natural resources or the capacities of the country. Attacks against professional leaders started with post-war certification procedures, but their skills were needed for reconstruction, so only a narrower stratum was affected at that time. Authoritarian attacks on old professionals multiplied after the introduction of planned economy and the rise of concept of ‘the country of iron and steel’. Based on archival sources, the exhibition shows how in the first half of the 1950s mining engineers and other mining-related professionals were dragged through the mire in Hungary.
Recsk
Forced labour camp
The exhibition presents the most notorious of all the labour camps existing in Hungary between 1950 and 1953. These were the toughest years of the dictatorial regime in the country after World War II. Here there were about one thousand five hundred political prisoners held captive without trial. The exhibition shows that the political police (named „ÁVO” later „ÁVH”) could bereave people of their freedom without a court decision, they could be interned as supposed or real enemies. Among other things, the exhibition presents the prisoners and the guards of the camp and their daily life based on archival sources, recollections and interviews.
Days of hope
Hungary – 1956
The crimes of Stalin were delineated in a four-hour speech by Secretary General Nikita Khrushchev in February 1956 at a closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. At the time all this had not yet been made public, but the jinn was out of the bottle. More and more critical voices were heard in Hungary as well, among others at the gatherings of the Writers' Association and the Petőfi Circle. The public wrong, lawlessness, deportations and the intimidation of the society after 1945 could not remain without consequences: people (a major part of the party cadres in power as well as the masses suffering from the despotism of the system) demanded the eradication of personal cult and terror, removal of culprits and the reform of the system. The exhibition shows how the demonstration turned into a revolution, the turning points of the 1956 revolution. It introduces the governments, parties, insurgent groups, symbols, symbolic squares, countryside battles, retaliation and the resistance following the revolution’s suppression.
You can reach it using the link.
As a result of several years of research, the archontology of the leaders of the political police was completed. The careers of the leaders of the era between 1944 and 1990 had been elaborated. This is an open and searchable database. You can reach it using the link.
Buried without a mark.
The aim of the website, created by the staff of the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security, is to present the most important data on the persons executed or killed during the political repression in Hungary between 1945 and 1967, and the most important data on the criminal proceedings related to them. The content of the website, which is based mainly on the archives of our archives, is constantly being expanded.
The Historical Archives considers it important that as many publications and processes as possible should be published and processed in accordance with the requirements of scientific source publication. With this aim in mind, they have launched their online journal the Betekintő, which is published four times a year. The Betekintő aims to make the workings, methods, organization and documents of the pre-1990 political police available to everyone.
Chernobyl Archives
On 26 April 1986, one of the worst nuclear accidents in the history of mankind occurred. In 2016, the staff of the Hungarian National Archives and the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security, with the support of the National Cultural Fund, will recall the history and the consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in Hungary through original archival sources.
Labour camps
In the dark chapter of Hungarian history between 1945 and 1953, tens of thousands of people, in addition to those sentenced to prison, were imprisoned for years in internment, or forced labour camps without any judicial proof, or lived as exiled, persecuted pariahs in the closed camps of "internment-like expulsions". Our website aims to commemorate the victims who were detained in various labour camps in Hungary between 1945 and 1953.
Collection of state security orders
The main objective of the archives - which is a close part of archontological research - is to discover and publish the norms (orders, instructions, rules of procedure, etc.) relateing to the functioning and organizational structure of the former political police. The Historical Archives Command Collection is gradually publishing the results of this research, which was supported by the National Cultural Fund, and is adding to the online collection of state security orders and instructions in parallel with the exploratory work.
Demonstrations’ archive
In the framework of the virtual exhibition, the Archive would like to show the social movements that took place in 1988-89, which contributed greatly to the change of regime. The website's resources section will be constantly updated.