The title of the article is "up to 60,000 former agents revealed"

Watch out who you assign that idea to though. My grandfather (taking some part in local resistance) was sent to a soviet camp due to a neighbour "informant". He told the family not to bother the neighbour - the information/signatures would be likely forced in interrogation and they'd be made to confess anything that was needed. Yet that neighbour "informant" could likely end up on one of lists like this.

The lists on their own say very little about what actually happened unless you have much more context.

And agent is not the same as informer. Whether it's better, worse, or the same is up to you.

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.

"i like waffles"

"oh so you HATE pancakes?!"

this is to say, no, it just means what it means. rest is all you man.

And they did a fantastic job putting shredded documents back together, that was one of the most interesting stories of the day.

Unfortunately the project seems to have stalled at the 91,000 document mark for automatic re-assembly (many more were done by hand).

an asset who is not aware is merely a useful idiot

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.

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.

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.

>Hungary had a revolution against Soviet control that was brutally suppressed

The "Prague Spring" was not what is generally described as a revolution, hence its "poetic" name. It was people's protests and Hungarian government acceptance/compromise/accomodation that loosened the strictures the people lived under

The Soviet Union did send in troops to undo these changes, and it was brutal, there just was not an insurrection underway.

And that's exactly where the term 'tankie' comes from.

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.

You conveniently ignore that "innocent" Hungary was a member of the Axis in WWII and participated in the bloodshed of Stalingrad.

Soviets were right to intervene.

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.

Proof please.

Is this another Hollywood CIA funded production? Release date on Netflix please.