Going to Moscow must surely have helped placate Furubotn`s urge to learn more than what his job as a political functionary in the tiny Norwegian party had permitted. In 1945 he even went so far as to say that he had lived a number of years in Moscow before discovering that he hadn't ``understood the first thing about Marxism'' and consequently set about ``studying Marxism''.(78) In many respects the stay in Moscow provided some compensation for his lack of education in Norway, which was, as mentioned, a factor in his inferiority complex. He was very well equipped intellectually, but his rich talents never had the benefit of the natural development which regular schooling and education would have ensured.

For Furubotn personally however, there were other more negative aspects to the period in Moscow,. He took his wife and their youngest daughter Magda with him in 1930, and they were followed later by their son Gilbert and daughter Ruth. Ruth returned to Norway after a couple of years. They lived at the Lux Hotel, together with most of the other international Communist leaders. It was a colourful environment, but the Furubotn family had a very hard time financially. They were barely able to manage(79), despite Furubotn's job as a Comintern functionary. His periodical drinking bouts did not make matters any better.

At one time he worked in his old trade at a Moscow furniture factory, a party punishment handed out by the Comintern. The work pleased him, however, and distanced him from the political problems he was struggling with but he was disappointed at the low levels of skill he found among the workers and the management.(80) The job brought him close to Russian workers in a different and more down-to-earth sense than was usual among Comintern functionaries.

Politically the years in the Soviet Union were of fundamental importance. His admiration for the Revolution could be described as love at a distance while he was a union leader in Bergen, and as an engagement while he was at the head of the NKP from 1923 to 1930. The journey to Moscow marked the beginning of unromantic and disillusioned ``married life''. It dawned on him slowly and gradually that not everything in the Soviet state was as admirable as he had supposed. To begin with, he saw the negative features as signs of the price the Soviet Union had had to pay for having been a backward country compared to Western Europe. But then came a series of direct confrontations with leading personalities in the Comintern.(81) These seldom failed to bring out his special characteristics: he lost all respect for authority and let his passions run wild.

The well-known oppositional Danish Communist Kai Moltke goes as far as to say that Furubotn in this way gradually became the ``rebel'' of the Communist movement and began to show independent characteristics in Moscow.(82) They worked together for two years in the Profintern. Similar comments have been made by a number of Norwegians who were in Moscow at the time, among them some who were already opposed to him.(83) Nevertheless, Furubotn's oppositional attitudes were not expressions of lack of confidence in Soviet policies. On the whole he accepted what happened, including the Moscow trials. Only towards the end of his stay in Moscow were fundamental disagreements with the Russians beginning to develop.(84) The principal bone of contention was the right a Communist party ought to have to govern itself. Kai Moltke said that the main lesson Furubotn took home with him from Moscow was a ``very thorough course'' in how not to manage politics. (85) The Russians had taken note of how difficult it was to cure Furubotn of his independence of mind. Immediately after the Bukharin trial in 1938, they accused him of being an imperialist agent, working for the British Secret Service in the Soviet Union.(86) He was in the gravest danger, but somehow or other the Norwegian press heard of the matter and made it known, undoubtedly helping to save his life.(87)