In dissolving the Comintern, the Russians were by no means slackening their grip on the Communist parties. In fact Asbjørn Sunde maintained in 1944 that the Comintern had only been dissolved on paper.(146) The clashes between Furubotn and the Russians continued, as was reflected for instance in the relationship between Furubotn and Sunde. Furubotn tried for a time to put Sunde in charge of the NKP's sabotage activities, and gave him practical and financial assistance,(147) but in the autumn of 1943 things came to a head between them. The reason Furubotn gives for the crisis in his wartime files is that Sunde was irresponsible as a saboteur,(148) a claim which was easy to substantiate at the time. Sunde`s alcohol misuse, for instance, made him a security risk on a number of occasions.(149) Furubotn also noted other factors - if somewhat cryptically - in a letter to Thorkild Jacobsen. Jacobsen was the NKP's head of sabotage in Western Norway. He had joined the NKP in 1933 and attended the Lenin school in Moscow from 1935 to l937.(150) He collaborated closely with Svale Solheim, who had worked for Soviet intelligence since the end of the 1930s.(151) Furubotn wrote that he could not speak openly about the question of who gave Sunde his orders, but assumed that Jacobsen and Solheim ``to an even greater extent'' fully understood where matters stood (underlined by PF): ``If not I will lay the cards on the table for you''.(152) What Furubotn was reluctant to discuss openly was Sunde's relations with the Russians, and that Furubotn had demanded that he break with them in order to become the NKP's head of sabotage.(153) Sunde refused, and in the autumn of 1944 said that he would not be guided by the NKP's Central Committee, which was ``completely subject to the London government''.(154)

Furubotn's clashes with Sunde should not be viewed in isolation: trouble was brewing in the central party system, too. Torolv Solheim demanded Furubotn's resignation as party leader. Solheim was one of the young men who joined the NKP at the end of the l920s, and had been active in Communist student circles in the l930s.(155) Quoting Stalin(156), he now claimed that Furubotn had disorganised the party.(157) He also demanded a discussion of whether there had been ``traitors in our innermost ranks''.(158) What he did not write in so many words in his motion was that he believed Furubotn to be an agent who betrayed his former enemies to the Gestapo.(159) The illegal NKP leadership seemed for a time to be on the point of breaking up, but then Solheim fled from the base because he thought Furubotn wanted to kill him.(160) He joined Asbjørn Sunde, with whom he had already been in touch.(161)

It cannot be claimed with any certainty that Solheim's move had been planned together with Sunde, and possibly originated in consultation the Russians, but nor can the idea be dismissed, especially since Solheim displayed a distinctly paranoid attitude towards Furubotn, believing for instance that Furubotn would poison him. That made him a useful instrument in the hands of Sunde and the Russians. How much danger Furubotn himself was in at the time is difficult to tell. One indication that he may have been at risk stems from Arvid G. Hansen, who spoke to the Soviet Ambassador Madame Kollontai in Stockholm in 1942. She found it suspicious that Furubotn had not obeyed the Comintern directive, conveyed by Linderot, that he should move to Sweden.(162) Madame Kollontai's reaction was in complete accordance with Stalinist hierarchical thinking and practice, according to which Furubotn should have gone to Sweden immediately, however strongly he disagreed with the order. The way in which the international Communist milieu functioned at the time, meant that Furubotn's independent behaviour gave rise to the suspicion that he was working for ``imperialism''. Such people were liquidated, especially if they held high positions in the movement.

In European terms, the hidden conflict between the Russians and Furubotn was not unique; similar things were taking place in Yugoslavia and Greece, for instance, where the Russians were having difficulties with such independent Communist resistance leaders as Tito(163) and Aris.(164) The surprise for Norwegians is that it happened here, too, as a number of documents in Furubotn's wartime files clearly testify. For such documents to have survived the war is in itself remarkable, as is the fact that any records of the conflict were kept at all during the war. Interviews have made it possible to study the problem in greater depth.(165) One thing that emerges beyond doubt is that Furubotn's independent policy had in fact greatly provoked the Russians. He provoked them not only in official documents, but also for instance when he wrote in 1944 that the party must find a policy which did not take Russia as its model.(166) He also wrote that the party's propaganda must be ``truly Norwegian - in other words not Russian''.(167) He voiced an interesting self-criticism when he remarked that ``We older ones'' in the party had grown ``a bit sterile'' with regard to finding Norwegian ways of presenting policies. He could be outspoken in personal letters, as when he wrote in August 1944 about the Russian habit of sending ``some comrade or other here'' with questions they wanted answered: ``It may have worked in the old days, but not any more''.(168) In addition to speeding up Furubotn's ``emancipation'', the war increased his self-confidence, as this letter testifies.

Furubotn's life up to the liberation in the spring of 1945 can be divided into five main phases:

1.       Local phase, 1890-1923

2.       National phase, 1923-30

3.       International phase, 1930-38

4.       Local phase, 1938-42

5.       National phase, 1942-45.

What distinguishes the first phase from the others is that he embarked on his organisational work in a trade union. After he had established himself securely in the trade union movement at the local level, he was recruited to professional politics at the national level. He very soon won high office in a political party, the NKP. As leader of the NKP, he was also given important positions in the Communist International.(169) During the third international phase from 1930-38, he worked in an international focused environment where he acquired vision and perspectives two qualities which were unusual among Norwegian politicians. However, his period at the international centre in Moscow brought no advancement for him in his political career, on the contrary, it led to his rapid demotion, not least in the form of banishment to Western Norway from 1938 on. But that gave Furubotn an opportunity to rebuild from the ground up. The 1940-45 period of war and occupation, and the lack of strong NKP leaders, enabled him to resume the leadership of the NKP, after twelve years on the fringes. From a historical point of view, five years is not long, but it was enough to give him experience and insight which it might have taken much longer to acquire under other circumstances. When peace brought a return to national politics and the need for ``normal'' presentations of party policies, he was much better equipped, both as a practical politician and ideologically, than he had been when he entered the national political arena in 1923. At fifty-five, he was past ``political middle age''.

Independence, initiative, originality and an enormous capacity for work were early characteristics of the joiner, union representative and politician Peder Furubotn, as was a fiery temperament. Such characteristics easily lead to clashes, especially within streamlined and centralised party machines like the Communist party. We have evidence that in the period between the wars they resulted in conflicts both in his own party and in relation to the Comintern. During the war, some of the issues came to a head on the question of whether the point of departure for Communist policy should be national or so-called international conditions. In practice, the latter view implied complete loyalty to Soviet interests. Furubotn chose on a number of occasions, for instance at the time of the Non-aggression pact from 1940 to 1941, to give more weight to national interests.