His own survival was sufficient reason for Furubotn to be suspicious of the Russians in 1942, not to mention afraid that they might use some wartime pretext to liquidate him. His eight years in the Soviet Union during which foreign Communists were liquidated taught him bitter lessons.(136) The Russians would obviously have registered as what they saw as his opposition to the Pact policy of 1940-41, and he would have known better than anyone else that that alone was enough to make them sceptical towards him, not least with his prewar deviations in mind. The extent of Soviet confidence - or lack of confidence - would be indicated by whether or not financial support for the NKP would be forthcoming during the war. Notes of a conversation with Asbjørn Sunde in 1944 show that the Russians stopped it in 1942, on the grounds that the NKP under Furubotn was not a Communist Party.(137) On this matter Sunde was an important source of information. By 1944 he had worked in close cooperation with the Russians for several years in connection with the Comintern's international sabotage network under Ernst Wollweber.(138) During the war Sunde is probably the leading Norwegian member of that network, and was under direct Russian orders, received by courier or by radio.(139) He was well informed; besides, the information he gave in 1944 has been confirmed by Furubotn in an interview.(140)

What makes the reason mentioned by Sunde for the stoppage of funds all the more likely is that compared to the practice permeating all the European Communist parties, the NKP under Furubotn was not Communist in the Stalinist meaning of the word. As 1942 wore on, Furubotn therefore had good reason to be anxious about relations with the Russians and Comintern. He concealed his uneasiness from most of the party leaders, but in the autumn of 1942 the situation must have been critical: he asked a younger party member whether he would follow him or the party if he had to break with the party.(141) This suggests that Furubotn's disagreements with the Russians were on the verge of forcing him to break with them.

This was taking place at a time when Norwegian resistance against the Germans was stiffening. Furubotn was the Gestapo's most wanted man in Norway: they tortured Norwegians to death in their search for him.(142) After all the years in Moscow, and after all his experience of the attempts to make the Communist movement Russian - for which he had been partly responsible himself - he naturally now felt a deep need to be whole-heartedly and completely Norwegian. The resistance gave him the chance to show it - as never before. This was an issue that could not be postponed. He had to take into account that he might at any time end up in front of a German firing squad. No wonder he occasionally gave vent to his anger with the Russians, as when he was asked if Stalin was in agreement with the NKP's war policy, and replied ``To Hell with Stalin and Moscow''(143), to the considerable amazement of his listeners and the others in the party system to whom the story was passed on.(144) Another remarkable thing is how conspicuous the name of Stalin is by its absence from all the party documents Furubotn wrote during the war; in Communist documents in other countries it recurs everywhere. His attitude in this connection comes out most clearly in the document he wrote when the Comintern was dissolved in 1943.

He opens by stating his agreement with the decision to discontinue the Comintern as the ``leading centre'' of the international labour movement, and by emphasising that its dissolution ``frees'' the NKP from its obligations to the Comintern's statutes and congress resolutions.(145) Next he quotes the actual announcement from the Comintern. Then he recalls the NKP resolution of 31^st December 1941, which contains what he has called Norway's war policy, and to which most of the document is devoted. He uses the dissolution of the Comintern to legitimize his own war policy.