Hungary and its communist legacy

In contemporary Hungary the government and the political elite still owe the people with what we call “facing the communist legacy”.

When the political system in 1989 was changed from communism’s single-party platform to democracy, which enabled multi-party national governance, many of the old system’s supporters, moreover pillars just fled to the new parties, remaining unspotted behind the scenes. Many of these people were former politicians from various levels (from assistants to members of the highest committees), businesspeople (out of the 100 richest Hungarians approximately 90% based their fortunes on connections and political influence from the earlier regime) and spies and informants. In this short essay I would like to focus on the latter group. These people were the ones who not only spied on foreigners in the country, but also after their own fellow citizens. Based on the information provided by these informants, people were laid off from one day to the other, got sentenced to prison without trial and sometimes sent to working camps because the “conspired” against the system: they, for example, listened to rock music or wore Ray-Bans. The current government has the names and details of all these people who were informants, but will not publicly release the records because they would reveal too many prominent people.

I would use Social Network Analysis to find identify the most probable people who might have been agents in order to question them and gain confirmation or rejection.

In order to accomplish this task, I would need the following data:

• Names and exact identifiers (SSN) of people who were penalized or sentenced for anti-revolutionary conspiracy or similar felonies
• The age of the convicts
• Name of employers (companies)
• Hobbies, sports, extracurricular activities
• Political views
• Marital status

The network question I would ask would be: Please list all the people that you have had a meaningful interaction with, in the past 3-4 months. Of course, the collection of these data is impossible, I do not even remember now whom I talked to a month ago, rest to recall whom I talked with or played soccer with 20 years ago, but let’s hypothesize that this is doable now.

Based on these data I would investigate the networks of the convicted people, where they overlap in case of workplaces, hobbies and other activities (different datasets). Data of course, needs to be dichotomized first and centrality analysis performed. Based on the ranked closeness, there may be a meaningful illustration where the strings end up – the people that can reach the most convicts with the least average steps may be suspicious. Also, people with the highest InEigenvectors, i.e. those connected to the most well-connected people, may be second-in-line in the chain of informants. Betweenness would show the toll booths of the network, the nodes where the most other nodes need to go through in order to get to the rest of the network. Subgrouping the population may be used to spot various groups on how people are connected: I’m pretty confident for example that soccer fans would build a significant group, connected loosely to those also interested in playing cards – the connecting nodes may be of interest.

Once again, it has to be emphasized that such an investigation must be conducted with appropriate caution. SNO does not give full confidence on the subject matter, only serves as a basis for further investigation. Let alone, approaching these people has to be handled by utmost care: reporters or police knocking on their doors can break their lives, not to mention the angry crowd that may attack them, maybe for no reason. Nevertheless, I believe that in this case, were there data available, SNA would help to uncover the truth and would allow the Hungary to face and close its past.