As an approach to these problems, biography was a natural choice as the mode of presentation, the emphasis being on elucidating the role of the party leader. Both Halvorsen, Knutsen and Stenersen concerned themselves with inner conflicts and groupings in the party leadership. Problems relating to the NKP have moreover tended to be placed within the parameters of traditional Norwegian party history. Admittedly, everyone points out international elements, and the important impact of Moscow on internal problems. Halvorsen, for instance, makes it a point, reiterated rather unquestioningly by Knutsen, that the Furubotn wing did not develop the new line adopted in 1945-47 on its own, but imported it from the international Communist movement.(73) The difficulty with this assertion is that Halvorsen gives no account of the new line as it manifested itself internationally or as it took shape in Norway. Altogether, a lack of comparison is a major methodological weakness in the work of Norwegian historians on the early postwar years of the NKP. What distinguishes Communist Parties from other political parties is that they see themselves as members of a relatively coherent international movement. That movement has traditionally been strongly linked to a single international centre, Moscow, as scholars today all agree. It is therefore reasonable to assume that these international links promote a form of behaviour in the Communist Party which distinguishes it from other ``normal'' parties. This is, at any rate, a working hypothesis which ought to be tested on the Norwegian Communist Party's behaviour from 1945 to 1950.

Problems of approach and methodology

Problems within the Communist movement have commonly been regarded in the light of the so-called monolith theory, as Franz Borkenau does in his classical work, Der europäische Kommunismus, Bern 1952. Borkenau writes in his introduction: (74)

An appearance of ``objectivity'' in the presentation of modern European Communism would be not only dishonest, but indeed  foolish. This account takes the rejection of Communism for granted. Yet the book is by no means propaganda. It is intended to meet the reader's need for a more thorough understanding and better knowledge of an enemy...

In the explanatory models which find expression in such works as Borkenau's, an outwardly monolithic Communism is seen as the manifestation of a corresponding inward monolithic condition. On this assumption, a scholar will expect to find, wherever he cuts into the monolith, the same uniform opinions, governed by directives from the party leaders in Moscow. Objections to such an approach have been raised in a number of recent contributions. In his comprehensive work on Communism in Italy and France, Donald L. Blackmer contends that views like the monolith theory principally stem from the cold war:(75)

There had never been much doubt - neither for Party members nor for anyone else - that the Communist Parties of Western Europe were in the last analysis responsive not so much to their domestic needs as to the interests of the Soviet party. Sophisticated research was not required to demonstrate that the sudden shift of the French and Italian parties to militant tactics in the fall of 1947 was undertaken at Moscow's direct command. The vivid demonstration of loyalty...tended to make any careful empirical examination of the actual party behaviour seem quite beside the point. What did it matter exactly what the parties said or did, since they said and did whatever the Russians asked? One should look to Stalin for enlightenment, not to Togliatti or Thorez. And by and large, that is just what students of Communism and other political analysts did.