The documents here analysed by George Mikes were smuggled out of Hungary after the rising of October 1956. They are manuals of instruction issued to members of the AVO - the secret police so hated throughout the country.At first there seems to be nothing very atrocious about these manuals. They do not deal with torture and murder and they are written in the businesslike, rather righteous tone proper to any handbook for a force empowered to maintain law and order. Their subjects are the techniques for searching houses in the owner's absence without living trace, of shadowing a man, of intercepting correspondence and telephone calls and, above all, of recruiting informers.Mr Mikes soon makes it clear that it is in the very 'ordinariness' of this material that the horror lies. The evidence is as appalling as any story of violence. These men take ut for granted that their officers should teach them, among other outrages, how to put a finger on the flaws in the character of anyone they may meet, on the blunders in his past, on his loves and his hates and his loyalties, so that they may line him up as a potential 'recruit'. They study society soberly and methodically, as though it were a collection of tools for the maintenance and increase of power over itself. The fungus of informers has now crept into every cranny of Hungarian life, and here we see exactly how and why this has happened: how the alternative to acceptance when the Hungarian police 'invite your co-operation' is nothing else but suicide.George Mikes's The Hungarian Revolution was 'incomparably the best picture of the Hungarian tragedy that has yet been shown to the West' (Glasgow Herald). He has followed it with a book no less important. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге A Study in Infamy, The Hungarian Secret Police. Исследование позора, венгерская тайная полиция (George Mikes)