This impression is strengthened if one takes a closer look at its organisational strength, press, and support in organised labour. As of 1^st May, 1946, the party mustered about 35,000 individually registered members.(6) The figure originated with the party's organisational secretariat and is official; it does not appear to be exaggerated. Ørnulf Egge, the organisational secretary at the time, maintained in 1976 that the figure could have been somewhat higher, but the party had been reluctant to open the flood-gates completely.(7) The party leadership had been afraid of too many ``emotional registrations'', he said. The membership of the youth organisation, the NKU, also shot up. With over 10,000 members, it regarded itself at one time as the country's largest youth organisation.(8)

Looking at the party press, one notes that the party ran, in addition to the three daily papers, in Bergen, Trondheimn and Oslo, a number of local newspapers up and down the country, although they were not published so frequently. The main organ Friheten stood in a class by itself: in September 1945 its circulation exceeded 100,000.(9) This included 70,000 regular subscribers, 50,000 resident outside the capital.(10) For a time Friheten was the country's second largest paper and probably the largest labour newspaper in the Nordic countries. From 1946 on, however, its circulation decreased steadily.

The Communists had always striven to win influence among the unions. Between the wars they had lost a great deal of ground, but this trend was now reversed. Between 30 and 40 per cent of union members voted Communist in 1945(11) and a number of leading union officials belonged to the party.

Although this growth was rapid, it had not come about overnight. The popularity of the Communists had been on the increase since 1942 but it was not until 1945-46 that the precise figures came out: the party had grown considerably. Officially the party was delighted. With between 30 and 50 per cent of the vote in many places, it could boast of being a people's movement, a term applied to the Communist advance in Norway in 1945 by a non-socialist Swedish newspaper.(12) Looked at more soberly, however, in the traditional terms of political power, the advance can be seen as a potential source of problems within the party.

A generation gap?

We do not know the exact numbers of the NKP membership in 1940. In the party and its youth group between them, there were probably in the region of 2,500 organised Communists in Norway.(13) In 1945, the corresponding figure was a good 45,000, an increase in the membership of purely Communist organisations by a factor of 18 in five years. To describe such progress as explosive is hardly to put it too strongly. No such party growth in so short a time had ever been seen in Norwegian political history; the only possible comparison could be with the Thrane movement.

Any party would find that growth of that order entailed problems. How was one for instance to blend the pre-war members with those who joined during or just after the war? Supposing the wartime and post-war generation brought with them political currents which deviated from pre-war NKP norms? Would the party officers from before the war survive in the flood of new officers?