On the question of the representativeness of the private files, it should be mentioned that they contain a great deal of official internal Party material, i.e. sources which reveal inner Party circumstances with no bias from either wing. In short, the position with regard to collected written sources is a substantial improvement on the norm for studies of other Communist Parties. At the back of the dissertation is a more detailed survey of the sources and of where they are available.

Oral sources

Owing to noticeable gaps in the source material, use has been considered of oral sources as an aid to research. In this context, oral sources means information gathered at some distance in time from the events in question - preferably by means of video or sound recordings of interviews or notes of information provided in conversations with persons who experienced the events. Recollections written down by the participants themselves may to some extent be included. An important feature of verbal sources is that they express the participants' own recollections of the circumstances they are asked about. The material has been gathered over a period of twenty years - 1969 to 1989 - in this country and abroad. A total of over 200 people were interviewed, over 100 of them using sound or video recording equipment. In transcript, these verbal sources now amount to 3,663 pages: one of the most comprehensive collections of interviews relating to European Communism. The sound recordings have been stored and are available at public institutions (as specified in the special appendix on source material). Before using verbal sources in the present study, the author had acquired considerable experience, in projects and in teaching, with the collection and processing of verbal sources; see especially the book ``Når folket fortel'' (As people tell it), Bergen and Stavanger 1982. Oral sources are studied on a par with written sources, and problems relating to their use are discussed whenever they are potentially controversial.

It can hardly be an exaggeration to say that the written and oral source material underlying this dissertation is unique in international research into Communism. In addition, the extensive oral sources open up an approach, rare in the European context, to the general question of the value of scholarly interviews in the study of politics at macro- and micro-levels in society. In this respect, the material lends itself to future utilisation in dissertations concerned with this subject.

Procedure in this dissertation

In accordance with what has already been said about various methodological approaches, this dissertation, too, employs a specific structure in getting to grips with the main question of what opportunities the party leader had to define party policies from 1945 to 1950. It is built up around seven main sections:

1. The biography of the principal participant up to 1945.

2. The international political context surrounding the main actor and his platform, the NKP from 1944 to 1947.

3. The party leader and the organisation: strength, rules of the game, and chains of command 1945-47.

4. The party leader, the party, and main political issues 1945-47.

5. The international political context surrounding the main actor and his platform, 1947-50.

6. The conflict over the shaping of party policy, 1947-50.

7. Discussion and conclusions.