Anyone attempting to place Furubotn in this welter of personal, regional, cultural and political clashes will notice that from 1923 on he appears as a much more controversial leader than before. His qualities as a leader were discussed at the top of the party hierarchy on a number of occasions. Olav Scheflo, one of his critics on the right wing, claimed that he was difficult to work with(46), but there were also many representatives, especially from the outlying districts, who praised him as an outstanding party leader.(47) In studying these inner party clashes, it is all too easy to get caught up in the ``easy/difficult to work with'' dichotomy but that is to over-simplify the issue. In relation to the dominant Oslo circles, Furubotn was culturally and in other respects an outsider. This alone was a sufficient source of trouble, especially since Furubotn made no attempt to tone down his Bergen manner.(48) Add this regional and cultural dimension to the enduring disagreements in the party leadership, and you have a situation in which people who stood up for their views were bound to find it difficult to cooperate. Furubotn was a strong and dominant character who would naturally attract this kind of criticism but the fact is that from 1923 to 1930 the entire NKP leadership was singly and collectively ``difficult to work with''.

There were sides to Furubotn which laid him more open to criticism than others. In the mid-l920s he developed a periodic drinking problem(49), and when he was having a bout he made no secret of it. This provided his old opponents with somewhere to place the blame for the accelerated downhill slide of the party from 1927 on. One does not find his abuse of alcohol mentioned in contemporary documents, as it was in the case of one of the other NKP leaders.(50) In Furubotn's case, it was brought out by his opponents especially after 1949, and was probably a problem which they had magnified in the interim.(51)

A new important factor in Furubotn's life from 1923 on his the need as leader of the NKP to take a stand on the consequences of the membership of the Comintern. At the Labour Party's February conference he had drawn attention to himself with the remark that he was not afraid of so-called democratic centralism or of directives from the Comintern leadership. He took it for granted that the leadership would be ``a reflection of our spirit''.(52) He said he felt a greater obligation to oberve the dictates of the international than of the national party.(53) He accordingly stood out initially as a strongly Moscow-oriented Communist leader. It should not be forgotten, however, that Furubotn had been deeply committed to the Norwegian labour movement for almost a decade by the time the Russian Revolution came in 1917. The poverty he had experienced in his childhood, and the misery among Norwegian workers, created in him the deeply-rooted conviction that a radical social upheaval was necessary in Norway. Revolution was the means which would shorten the road to a better life for the oppressed. So although it can be demonstrated that Furubotn was a warm spokesman for the revolution and for the new Soviet Union, we can also see the principles and ideological conditions on which he based his attitudes. He did not, for instance, accept democratic centralism unreservedly - it must not lead to a ``party bureaucracy'' seizing power in the labour movement. In 1923, he said:(54)

I completely agree with Tranmæl that any such formal bureaucracy must be struck down. Indeed that is what the whole development of our party since 1911 has been aimed at...

Concerning the Russian Revolution, Furubotn's reservations in principle are also sufficiently clear: (55)

It will not do to say with (Einar) Gerhardsen that we are fond of the International and feel love for it. We are not fond of it in that sense. We are fond of our own liberation, and support the International because it is necessary. At the last conference, Scheflo said that we should be members of the International in order to win in our struggle. Professor Bull, on the other hand, says we should be members for the sake of the Russian Revolution, out of admiration for the Russian working class. The difference between these motivations reveals where a Marxist understanding lies.