Keyword – cooperation

Nagy, Róbert:

The life and revolt of an agent at Lake Balaton: The Varga file

During the Kadar regime the lake of Balaton played key role in state-security observation. In the 1980s, in addition to monitoring people who came for vacation, the secret police invested more energy into observing members of the political opposition. The weekend houses at the lake served as spots of oppositional gatherings, and very often the producers of underground literature maintained printing-machines as well. To illustrate this, the files of a secret agent provide excellent sources. While analysing the documents, this paper asks the questions of why collaborating with the Office of States Security served the agent’s interests, whether he was efficient, and what the reactions were to his reports. It is also important to establish what extent the accounts carried the agent’s ideas and in what ways they were productions of the political regime.

Keywords: agent, cooperation, dissidents, samizdat, state-security