Between 1923 and 1940, the NKP had changed into a small sectarian party which adhered very closely to Comintern ideology, i.e. to the belief that Communist parties of the world were directed from one centre: Moscow. The new young members who were swelling the party ranks were generally unacquainted with the traditions on which the old guard had been weaned. This in itself was a potential threat to party unity; attention was drawn to the problem in 1946 by the labour organisation paper Vårt arbeid (Our Work), which wrote that at the time of the liberation the party had acquired masses of members who had either belonged to no organisation at all or had been members of non-Communist organisations(14), and that they lacked the qualifications to build up a Communist Party.

It is worth noting what prominent positions in the party leadership had been won by the younger generation just after the liberation; the party congress in 1946 confirmed the trend: only about 16 per cent of the 313 delegates were pre-war members. A good 80 per cent were under 40, and about 45 per cent were former members of the Labour Party.(15) These figures help to explain the fears of the leading pre-war members for the party's traditional Communist character. But can it really be demonstrated that the party's post-war progress gave rise to internal problems?

Wings at odds?

Most parties contain at least two opposed wings or groups, a normal situation which a party can usually live with. Nor was it, as such, abnormal for the NKP, which had experienced inner strife ever since its creation in 1923.

The disagreements in the pre-war NKP alone would lead one to expect a certain degree of conflict in the party after the liberation. Some of the pre-war clashes were aggravated during the war, especially in the period 1940-41 but the war and underground activities had provided the external pressure needed to make opponents bury the hatchet. The war had also split up NKP groupings. The Germans executed 21 members of the Central Committee(16), some had been held in concentration camps in Norway or Germany, and others had lived in exile in England or Sweden, and a few in the Soviet Union. In 1945 this external pressure was ended, and the scattered NKP gradually reassembled in the course of the summer. Outside observers might be excused for thinking that the party stood politically united, but under the surface trouble was brewing. What sort of people and organised groupings can be said to have been confronting each other in the NKP from 1945 on? For the sake of clarity, only the best known and most prominent NKP leaders are included in the following cast of characters.

The Furubotn wing

It has been customary to claim that as General Secretary, Peder Furubotn had gathered around him a number of young people who joined the party during the war(17), and whom he used as ``stalking-horses'' while retaining for himself the position of the strong and unquestioned leader. Books and newspapers have labelled this group the Furubotn wing of the NKP. Although this view has a lot to be said for it, Furubotn did not only surround himself with youngsters in 1945, but also had the support of several of the best-known NKP leaders from the years between the wars, such as Martin Brendberg, Arvid G. Hansen and Håvard Langseth.

Martin Brendberg (1896-1953) was a miner and construction worker.(18) At the time of the party split in 1923 he went with the NKP, and was to make his mark especially as secretary in North Norway from the autumn of 1930 on. The NKP registered substantial progress in votes and membership after he began his activities in the North.(19) In 1936 he became a member of the Central Committee of the NKP(20), and in 1940 he was the party's secretary for trade unions. He played an important part in the so-called trade union opposition of 1940, as a spokesman for the non-aggression pact line. The grouping was in favour of a certain degree of co-operation with the Germans. In the autumn of 1940, Jens Tangen, who had recently been appointed chairman of the Federation of Trade Unions (LO) by the Germans, chose Brendberg to be his personal secretary.(21) That gave him a prominent position in the Federation until the autumn of 1941. In the spring of 1941, he was among the party leaders in Oslo who were then in favour of co-operation with Furubotn's resistance work in Western Norway.(22) In 1942 he left for Sweden, where he was an active worker for the NKP among the Norwegian exiles.(23) He returned illegally to Norway in 1944, and worked at Furubotn's underground centre as the leader of the NKP's illegal trade union network.(24)