Bálint Ruff says Hungarian history has long been shrouded in darkness, and his boss wants him to turn on the lights. Ruff, a top deputy to Prime Minister Péter Magyar, is spearheading renewed scrutiny of long-secret files from four decades of communism and of documents from the era of Viktor Orbán, Magyar’s predecessor. Although Ruff rejects any suggestion of a moral equivalence between Orbán’s elected government and the Soviet-imposed communist dictatorship, both bent the historical record to fit their narratives and spread misinformation to keep citizens in the dark. “I don’t like secrets that turn into taboos,” says Ruff, a longtime adviser to opposition politicians and prominent critic of Orbán’s authoritarian rule.

For the past half-year, Ruff has been the driving force behind efforts to open records (on paper and decades-old computer tape) compiled by the communist-era secret police with names of collaborators and informants. And his teams are combing through mountains of files seeking evidence of corruption or theft of public money on Orbán’s watch, turning over suspect cases of self-dealing to prosecutors — actions the former premier says are simply persecution by his successor.

The transparency campaign, Ruff says, will build a kind of immune system to help Hungary avoid succumbing to any future Orbán-like capture of state institutions. “It’s the responsibility of politicians, journalists and citizens to describe what happened in this country over the past 16 years,” Ruff says. “That understanding will help us reach a consensus that we don’t want this to happen ever again.”

Six months after his resounding defeat of Orbán’s Fidesz party, Magyar is moving as fast as he can. He knows that even after his Tisza party won almost three-quarters of the seats in the parliament, he has a limited window to unwind his predecessor’s influence. He’s proposed an ambitious budget that aims to put Hungary on track to adopting the euro, which will mean reversing years of fiscal largesse that has saddled the country with some of Europe’s highest borrowing costs.

To maintain the sky-high level of support he currently enjoys, Magyar has continued the social media strategy that propelled him to power over the past two years. On Facebook he can be found picking fights in the replies to posts by politicians or articles on news websites. Open Reddit, and there’s a post from u/MagyarPeterTisza defending the government’s record. When Ukraine’s foreign minister published criticism of Hungary on X while in New York long after the sun had set in Budapest, Magyar replied within minutes.

On his first trip to Brussels as prime minister, Magyar gave an impromptu livestreamed tour of a city Orbán had demonized over years of railing against the European Union. “Not a bad place, this Brussels,” Magyar says in a selfie video as he’s driven from the airport, the signal breaking up when he passes through areas with poor reception.

He brings that directness to the streets, sometimes grabbing a Hungarian flag and leading processions through Budapest, with little in the way of security to keep the public from crowding in on him. He often dons traditional garments such as a , a braided, buttoned jacket that had been appropriated as a symbol of the nationalist far right.

It’s easy to dismiss Magyar’s performance as political theater for the social media generation, but he appears to be aiming higher. For a jaded electorate that feels duped by decades of empty promises of unveiling the past and holding perpetrators to account, Magyar’s administration is out to prove that this time things have really changed.

Almost daily, Ruff’s team unearths questionable deals signed by Orbán’s government, and it’s slowly releasing summaries of thousands of government decisions from the Orbán era that had been kept from the public. Inside Budapest’s neo-Gothic parliament building, investigative commissions are holding hearings on the misappropriation of state assets following the fall of the Iron Curtain and suspected fraud at the central bank under Orbán.

Top officials from the previous government have been subpoenaed. Authorities have taken a former central bank chief and two former ministers into custody and issued an arrest warrant for the central banker’s son. Some of Orbán’s top lieutenants are expected to be next, and Magyar has called on prosecutors to question Orbán himself.

They all deny any wrongdoing, with Orbán saying the corruption allegations are a confected campaign against him and his party. Fidesz calls the two detained ministers “political prisoners” and has arranged prayer sessions for them. Orbán insists the real goal is to gather material that can be used against him. “They arrested them to find a way to arrest me,” he said at a party gathering on Oct. 18.

Just days later, Orbán was spotted in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, sitting pensively before a monument to participants in Hungary’s ill-fated anti-Soviet uprising of 1956. It was a striking image of a man who in recent years had grown increasingly close to the Kremlin, and one of whose advisers has suggested that the 1956 insurrection should never have happened — a statement akin to dismissing the American or French revolutions as pointless.

Meanwhile, historians have been working through pre-1990 security service files, decades after other countries in the region did so. The volume is so great that the archive missed Magyar’s targeted release date of Oct. 23, the 70th anniversary of the start of the 1956 insurgency. The plan now is for some archives to be opened on Nov. 4, the anniversary of the day Soviet tanks rolled in to crush the rebellion, with the rest trickling out over the next four months, Magyar told lawmakers yesterday. “This nation, which experienced such tragedy and loss in the 20th century, can only heal if it faces its traumas and its own responsibility,” he said.

Under rules in place until this year, credentialed researchers had access to many of the documents, but secret service officials could block their release simply by citing a risk to national security. Magyar has revised the regulations, giving a new committee the final say on publication, with exceptions only when the files contain information that might compromise active security operations or damage relations with allies — a category that pointedly excludes Russia.

Many documents have been shredded over the years, and others have gone missing, but analysts at the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security expect about 55,000 names to come to light in the process. They say that’s only about a third of what the original files held, but even the remnants will cause surprises. “Everyone is going to find a relative, an acquaintance, a friend, classmate or colleague who was an informant,” István Papp, the archive’s research director, told reporters in September. “And that informant won’t always be on the ‘other’ side. It could be our grandfathers, uncles, godfathers, beloved teachers, friendly neighbors.”

Proponents of opening the archive say it will allow people who have been dogged by allegations of wrongdoing to clear their names. One of these is Orbán. In the communist era, though, he was a closely monitored dissident who was repeatedly arrested for his political activities, and most historians dismiss the allegations against him as fanciful. But Orbán and his party did fail to open the files after pledging to do so multiple times over the years and have long accused just about anyone who opposed him of being a “communist.”

Over the years, compromising information has surfaced at seemingly strategic moments, sinking the careers of dozens of public figures, including at least one prime minister. In 2002 leaked files showed that Socialist Premier Péter Medgyessy was a “network member” in the bureaucratic parlance of the security services. The leak, to a newspaper aligned with Fidesz, helped increase Orbán’s grip on his party.

Ruff doesn’t rule out the possibility that current politicians might come up in the mix, though given the passage of time, the people in question would be nearing retirement. Still, he has limited sympathy. “They had 36 years to reveal what happened to them,” he says. “They still can.”

For Magyar’s broad coalition, elected in a landslide with the promise of accountability for those who spent years dipping into the public trough, knowing the details of past ills is essential to building a healthier future. And that, Ruff says, means examining the dark corners of Hungary’s history, whether during the communist era or under Orbán. “It's about coming to terms with the past,” he says. “That’s how civic democracy begins.”