Those possessing power always possess control over information. To establish continuous control over society’s political, economic, cultural and information structures, their strategic aim is to become ‘super-informed’. Conspirative political police, with clandestine institutional background, secret personnel and operative techniques, and the disciplinary practices of the Establishment, have always considered ‘watching the enemy’ as crucially important in perpetuating the power postition. Since the events of an erstwhile present become historical facts of the future, the world of politics can be viewed as contemporary history. This study, through the analysis of Hungarian state security textbooks and training films, examines the methods of the political police of gathering information in a sphere fixated by the ‘gaze of state security’, as well as the ways people in this special position perceived what they were watching and how this peculiar angle influenced their view of society’s events. The main focus of the study is the training of the official and cooperating conspirative agents in this special ‘gaze’, its concealment, and pretence.

According to historical evidence the relationship between power and the physical body is one that has played a crucial role in the maintenance of political equilibrium in every age. In my paper I attempt to reconstruct the events of a given historical period, the period between 1945 and 1956 from the aspect of state security. I have relied on the documents of the mock trials of the Rákosi-era, the sate security documents generated during the review of the activities of the State Security Authority at the end of the 1950s and the memoirs of survivors. I have consciously strived to include as many original parts as possible. The focus of my interest was directed at the diff erent representations of the actors of the age based on their social habitudes, the personal experience of history: how did the holders of power on the various levels of society think about the body, how id they (mis)treat it and what were the corporeal experiences of those subjugated to their power during this dour period of our history. Wit the help of the memoirs I have shown the importance of human dignity even in these extreme situations, the importance of one’s own concept of his/her body and the fi ner aspects of interpersonal communications (perhaps hard to comprehend in such crude life situations) as facial gestures, glances or the human skin as a vehicle of meaning. My paper follows the passage of the human body from its seizure and total depersonalization to full exploitation. To depict this I have described the methods used in the institutions of state security as well as the ways of the final disposal with the human body.