Courtois claims that as early as November 1944, Furubotn came out in official party documents with ``a Communism in Norwegian...long before Maurice Thorez''.(69) He sees the struggle in the NKP in 1949 as a consequence of Furubotn's contribution to the resistance, which was contrary to Stalin's policy in 1940-41, and of his generally independent line during the war. According to Courtois, the purge followed from Stalin's policy from 1948 to 1952 towards leading Communist resistance fighters, and was put into practice through his supporters in the various Communist parties: ``At the end of the war, Stalin had two accounts to settle: one with those who for anti-Fascist reasons had in some way or other opposed his 1939-41 alliance with Hitler, and another with those who had acted in good faith with regard to developing a national line in their parties. These types of persons were often one and the same. The purges of the latter type began in 1945 when Earl Browder was thrown out of the leadership of the American Communist Party''.(70)

The purges of the other Communist leaders had to wait a few more years, depending on how strongly they stood. After having a number of NKP documents from the 1939 to 1946 period translated into French, Courtois has since developed these views in more detail, both in interviews and in books, most recently in the handbook Le communisme, edited with Marc Lazar, Paris l987.(71) Courtois is today a leading light in the field of international research into Communism. He edits the inter-disciplinary journal Communisme and is joint director, together with Annie Kniegel, of the University of Nanterre's Centre for Research into Communism in Paris.

Generally, then, the international surveys tend to focus on the NKP's 1949 showdown, seeing it as a case of Soviet interference on a par with the Soviet interference in practically every other Communist Party at the time. The further one is removed from Norway, the more important it becomes to emphasise the Soviet role. Since, Courtois apart, these opinions are contained in what are virtually reference works, they call for little more than registration as hypotheses current in the international research environment.

Summary and problem definition

Surveying research into Norwegian Communism in the 1945 to 1950 period as a whole, one finds that a fair amount has been published. Apart from Trond Gilberg's treatise and the Furubotn biography, partial analyses predominate. Research initially focussed on one partial issue, the conflict within the NKP in 1949. This partial analysis was in a scientific vacuum, without past causes or future consequences. Despite this limitation, the actual workmanship concerning the study of the party struggle was so good that Halvorsen's work came to serve as a model for later studies of the party history from that time. Both their views and their footnotes show that Knut Einar Eniksen, Paul Knutsen, Øivind Stenersen and Trond Bergh all retain some of Halvorsen's main hypotheses. Knowing as we do today that Halvorsen arrived at major conclusions without any thorough analyses of the policies or political practice of the NKP from 1945 to 1950, we can say that his work is due for reconsideration - as he has admitted himself in drawing attention to this inadequacy.(72) Any changes in the conclusions drawn by Halvorsen must also affect the accounts of those others who based their work on his.