On 22^nd June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union and overnight European Communist parties reversed the policies they had stood for since the autumn of 1939. For most European Communists this must have been a great relief. For Furubotn it meant more elbow room than before. Yet the reversal of the party's policy did not bring him back into the ranks of the leadership. Not long after the attack on the Soviet Union, he argued that the NKP should support the war being waged by the exiled Norwegian Government in London, to which its own resistance work should be a supplement.(113) At the time, Furubotn was one of the relatively small number of Norwegian politicians who expressed whole-hearted support for the Nygaardsvold Government in London, which was the object of much suspicion in leading political circles on the home front. In the autumn of 1941, senior civil servants and politicians in Oslo even demanded the Government's resignation as soon as the war was over.(114) Furubotn again stood out, this time with his realistic reading of what the Norwegian struggle entailed. For a known Communist to take the lead in supporting a Government which had been so discredited on the home front in 1940-41 was quite remarkable, but Furubotn's motives were clear enough. He was afraid that speculation about who was to govern Norway after the war would paralyse the struggle on the home front, reducing it to internal squabbles(115) and making life easier for the Germans and Nasjonal Samling (NS). The likelihood of such internal wrangling was evident from his own party. The Central Committee in Oslo sent out a resistance programme with the rider that the party would soon be faced with the task of seizing power in Norway. (116) It is impossible to tell how far this had been cleared with the Russians. Because of the fighting, contacts with Russia were difficult in the summer of 1941, so that this was probably a home-brewed document, along the NKP's traditional class struggle lines. It made Furubotn even sharper in his criticism of the Central Committee in Oslo.(117) Nevertheless, he was invited to Oslo towards the end of the year to give a lecture on what he believed the party's policy ought to be.

For a regional district to achieve so much by means of criticism, like Furubotn's, of the central party leaders is unique in NKP history, and quite possibly in the history of Communist parties generally. The normal outcome of such activity was exclusion from the party. Various factors contributed to Furubotn's success. He had been active in the resistance for almost a year and a half - as no other Communist had been elsewhere in the country. That gave the West Norwegian branch of the party unusual ``expertise''. Furubotn had established a broad network of contacts with party and union members in the western region, as well as developing good relations with both Labour Party and non-Socialist members of the resistance. In a letter dated April 1941, he mentioned close cooperation with prominent Labour Party people in Western Norway(118), and this is borne out by the fact that such people had been providing him with hide-outs since the winter of 1940-41.(119)

The position in Oslo was that the majority of the old NKP leaders had either been arrested on 22 June, become passive, or fled to Sweden. In the autumn of 1941, control of the party was largely in the hands of a small circle of trade union men and the few remaining old leaders. Among the union members there was a fraction which had been sympathetic to Furubotn's resistance line from the start in 1940.(120) The absence of most of the pre-war leaders provided an opening for Furubotn to put forward what experience in western Norway had taught him. The time was ripe for a thorough airing after the pact policy period. The upshot was that a meeting of the expanded Central Committee on New Year's Eve 1941-42 elected Furubotn General Secretary of the party. The meeting adopted what he referred to, interestingly enough, not as the party's war policy, but as ``Norway's war policy''.(121) He was also authorised to put the new policy into practice.

The meeting which unanimously elected him was a representative gathering of about thirty of the country's leading Communists.(122) But they had a variety of motives for electing him General Secretary. As one of his old opponents remarked, who would have believed that he could survive the war? (123)