Like Lippe and Løvlien, Johan Strand Johansen (1903-1970)(60), popularly known as Strand, belonged to the intermediate generation of early NKP leaders - who received much of their political schooling between the wars at party schools in Moscow. Strand Johansen completed upper secondary school(61), acquiring enough languages to be able to participate in international Communist Party life. Having joined the Labour Party youth organisation in 1921, he was soon given leading positions in that body. When the party split in 1923, he joined the NKP, where he soon acquired a reputation as one of its leading youth activists. He was arrested a number of times for his political activities, the last time in 1931 during the ``battle of Menstad''. He made several visits to the Soviet Union, where he spent a total of seven years between the wars. He learned fluent Russian, translated works by Lenin and Stalin into Norwegian(62), and married a Russian Jew. From 1931 on he worked for Arbeideren and then became a member of the party's Central Committee. In 1940 he was one of the party's most passionate defenders of the Non-Aggression Pact policy(63), sharply attacking those who held that the pact was short-term and tactical in nature. When in the spring of 1941 leading Communists began discussing the subject of war between the Soviet Union and Germany and the question of when they would have to go underground, Strand Johansen replied that the Soviet Legation would notify them in good time.(64) On the 22^nd June 1941, he and his wife were arrested and sent to German concentration camps. His wife was executed, and his imprisonment did him permanent psychological harm. He worked as the Norwegian prisoners' representative. On his return to Norway in 1945, he promptly resumed party work and in June 1945, as Minister of Labour, he became one of the two NKP ministers in Einar Gerhardsen's coalition government. He was a popular speaker and much in demand in the NKP, but also well-liked outside of it.(65) According to Trygve Bull, Prime Minister Einar Gerhardsen regarded Johansen as the only NKP leader in 1945 of any political stature.(66)

Mutual distrust

A look at the confrontations in the NKP just after the liberation shows clearly enough that the wartime leader Peder Furubotn had a strong group around him, unified and having to a large extent shared wartime resistance experience. Confronting them was a gathering with no clear leader or, at the time, any comparable unifying experience of comradeship. What they had in common was that they had been party leaders in the 1930s, while Furubotn was in Moscow: the party had been ``theirs''. As things stood in 1945, Johan Strand Johansen should probably be regarded as their main figure. Most of them also had in common that they had been in exile, in prison, or relatively passive during the occupation; Christian Hilt was the major exception that proves the rule.

What was the nature of these clashes just after the war? In subsequent biographies, several of those involved placed the emphasis on personal factors, an explanation for which there is much to be said. It is enough simply to consider the mutual suspicion that arose on the grounds of where one had been during the war. According to Leiv Vetlesen, the Furubotn wing often passed ``harsh and categorical'' judgements on party members who had wound up in German captivity through carelessness. Important leaders who returned to the NKP after the war having had that kind of experience, encountered not only new party officers, but also new party members who made no secret of the fact that they regarded ``their own efforts'' as more important and valuable to the party.(67)