Furubotn was back in national politics, again as the top leader of the NKP but would the Comintern leadership in Moscow approve the election, as the rules of the Comintern and the NKP required? (124) Furubotn had good reason to wonder. The formal requirement of Comintern rules was one thing, but practice was another matter and one that in the final analysis was of more consequence. It was Stalin's privilege to appoint Communist leaders, and European Communist parties can rarely have chosen new leaders without prior approval from Moscow. Furubotn's only justification for by-passing the traditional routine was that the war required unconventional action. Had he been an ``unflawed'' Communist leader before 1941, he might have had less reason for anxiety.

Furubotn immediately notified Moscow of the changes in the NKP on New Year's Eve 1941-42, requesting approval of the resolutions.(125) He got no answer. He used a regular courier between the NKP centre in Norway and Stockholm in Sweden, Leif Myrmel, who had worked for Furubotn since 1940.(126) Myrmel also helped Jarzev, who was responsible for Comintern affairs at the Russian Embassy in Stockholm.(127) So Furubotn had direct contact with the Russians in Stockholm, and they had direct contact with Moscow, at least by radio. The failure to give approval to Furubotn in his acquisition of the party leadership was therefore due not to poor lines of communication, but to the Soviet distrust of Furubotn which went back to the pre-war years.

The matter of where the NKP was to base its wartime headquarters strengthens this supposition. According to Furubotn in 1971, the Comintern formally resolved early in 1942 that the NKP Central Committee, including Furubotn himself, should be moved to Sweden for security reasons.(128) Furubotn claims to have ignored the resolution. In the autumn of 1942, the leader of the Swedish Communist Party, Sven Linderot, crossed the border to a secret rendezvous with Furubotn. (129) As a citizen of neutral Sweden, he could make the journey legally; it seems likely that he also visited Western Norway in the autumn of 1941.(130) At the time, Linderot was the Comintern's leading representative in Scandinavia. He asked Furubotn to move to Sweden. The Central Committee could stay in Norway so long as the General Secretary was safe and sound in neutral territory.(131) The fact that the Comintern sent such a prominent representative as Linderot shows the importance the Russians attached to the matter.

Furubotn's account of the Linderot mission finds confirmation in other sources. Rodny Öhman from Bergen, married in 1942 to Gunnar Öhman, then one of the Swedish Communist Party's most prominent members, confirmed it in an interview(132); she knew about Linderot's mission because she was his secretary. There is also a book, written in 1950 by the well-known Swedish ex-Communist Per Meurling, in which he reports an account Furubotn gave of the event in 1948.(133) So although we have no written documents from 1942 to go on, these sources are a sufficient basis for maintaining that Furubotn's claim that the Russians wanted him to move to Sweden in 1942 is correct. Was Furubotn's safety the main reason though?

Furubotn's activities would have been much more restricted in Sweden than in Norway. The Swedish government was anti-Communist and did not permit the sort of work he was engaged in. Furubotn had reason to fear imprisonment or, if the worst came to the worst, being handed over to the Gestapo, as two other Norwegian Communists were and subsequently beheaded.(134) This state of affairs makes it rather less likely that the Comintern was mainly motivated by concern for the safety of the NKP leadership when it resolved that they should be moved to Sweden. Furubotn then argued that the reason was that the move would have made the Russians better able to control the NKP leadership and put pressure on it.(135) This seems more likely to have been the real motivation.