Norwegian works

In order to plot Furubotn's position in his political universe, we need the help of the scholarly works published about him and his party. Their approaches vary considerably, but can perhaps be summed up under three main headings. One issue has been the extent of Moscow's grip on the Communist Party: how far was it absolute, and how far could the Norwegian party retain its freedom of manoeuvre? A second topic has been the discovery of two main wings in the party in the 1945 to 1950 period, and of the conflict between these so-called Furubotn and Løvlien wings; among the questions asked are where the wings stood with regard for instance to forming alliances, the farmers, the nation, and the class struggle, and whether the disagreements originated in Norway or abroad. In more recent years, the discussion has turned to whether from 1945 to 1950 the Norwegian Communist Party was revolutionary or reformist. Generally speaking, the problems have all been posed with the party rupture of 1949 as their point of departure or as their conclusion.

Terje Halvorsen

The first person to consider the party's problems from 1945 to 1950 in any detail was Terje Halvorsen in his book NKP i krise (the NKP in crisis), Oslo 1981. He has also published articles on the subject in the periodicals Syn og Segn(8) and Kontrast(9). His book is an empirical investigation of what happened in the party showdown of 1949. He tries to establish why it happened and why it took on such dramatic dimensions that a minority in the party leadership was able to exclude the majority. Halvorsen sees two phases of disagreement in the party. The tension from 1945 to 1947 was between two nuclei in the leadership: the wartime Communists grouped around the General Secretary, Furubotn, and the pre-war Communists supporting the Chairman, Emil Løvlien. During this first phase, according to Halvorsen, the Furubotn wing was a right wing, before suddenly switching to being the left wing during the second phase, when the Løvlien group became the right wing. Disagreement was aggravated during this second phase, to reach a peak over the national question, with Løvlien accusing the Furubotn wing of non-Marxist and nationalist views.

Halvorsen also shows that the two wings clashed over what the party's class base ought to be. The Løvlien wing reacted against the notion that the party should be ``the spokesman for the interests of the petty bourgeois and the farmers''.(10) In Halvorsen's view, the Furubotn wing polarised relations between the wings after 1947 by switching to what was virtually an extremist position on the left(11), and he argues that the Løvlien wing wanted reforms to be their political guideline, whereas the Furubotn wing saw the power struggle as the main item on the agenda. In addition to their political disagreements, the two cores in the leadership also came into conflict over organizational matters: ``Furubotn's men had formed a separate `circle' around Furubotn, and their primary loyalty was to him''.(12) Because the Løvlien wing held the majority in the party leadership from June 1946 to February 1949, they were greatly irritated by the activities of the Furubotn people. As Halvorsen sees it, this documented internal strife in the party is a necessary premise for understanding the dramatic 1949 showdown, and can also ``to a large extent'' be regarded as a sufficient explanation of events.(13) As he puts it:(14)

It does not appear to be necessary to adduce foreign (Soviet) interference as the source of conflict in the Norwegian Communist Party...