For their part, many of the old guard of party leaders were hostile to the new leadership who, apart from being a threat to their own former power, also to a large extent supported Furubotn, to whom the old hands had been so strongly opposed before the war. Tom Rønnow says that those who joined the party during the war were made to feel less than welcome in certain party circles, as if they were disturbing the old ``family idyll''.(68) The political origins of several of the new leaders in the Labour Party youth organisation also made the old guard suspicious. This applied particularly to Ørnulf Egge, who was reckoned to be a Trotskyite. Among traditional Communists this was a mortal sin in 1945.(69) Furubotn support of a person with such a past was held against him.

Purely personal relations, then, gave plenty of scope for party unrest in 1945. But it should be borne in mind that these disagreements were little known to anyone but the central leaders in Oslo, and that no absolute split of the party leadership into two factions occurred even there. A number of prominent figures did not take sides, and most of those who noticed the clashes after the war did not attach too much importance to them.(70) It was only to be expected that the members of a party which had grown so fast would have difficulty for a time in adjusting to politically working together. Viewed simply in their 1945 context, the disputes were not remarkable as such; what was remarkable to anyone who knew the leading inner circles well was that they were so heated. Leiv Vetlesen argues that the NKP, which met in May 1945, was in reality two Communist parties.(71) In his opinion, Furubotn had built up a ``completely new''(72) Communist Party during the war, with a nucleus of new cadres who knew neither the party's history nor the old leaders.

Without attempting to establish here whether the confrontations were as dramatic as Vetlesen says or simply originated in personal relations, we can state that foreign Communist leaders who visited the NKP were also surprised by their intensity. In 1946, the chairman of the Danish party, Aksel Larsen, and the editor of their principal newspaper, Børge Houmann, attended the NKP's national conference. The disagreements within the NKP disturbed the Danish Communist leaders. Larsen and Houmann have given separate accounts of the problem. Houmann says that the differences in the DKP ``were as nothing compared to conditions in Norway. We had nothing like that at that time.''(73) The NKP with its clashes stands out against in contrast to other European Communist parties at this time, which may have experienced occasional unrest and opposition after 1945, but never reached the same critical state as the NKP. It was only a matter of time before the in-fighting became public.

NKP rules and chains of command

Between the wars, Communist parties had been strictly disciplined. It took little for party members to be excluded. Anyone seeking to oppose the majority in the party leadership had to be very careful to follow the rules of the party game, especially if they did not have Moscow behind them. The NKP rules were codified in the party statutes. To understand how things worked out for Furubotn and his opponents in the post-war NKP, one needs to know them.

The NKP's party structure and statutes originated in the Comintern's model statutes from the inter-war years.(74) In other words, the NKP was based on so-called ``democratic centralism''.(75) Members elected their officers and governing bodies democratically, but having done so, they had also delegated a great deal of their authority to central party agencies. Subordinate local party units were obliged to implement directives adopted over their heads, deriving ultimately from the central national leadership as the highest authority, often called the central committee. An application for membership of a Communist Party meant accepting this type of organisational practice. Communist parties accordingly became strongly centralised. In theory they were meant to be both democratic and centralist at the same time. The model for this kind of organisation can be attributed to Lenin. He wanted Communist parties to be like armies, with soldiers and officers, and with central committees as the general staffs, which were to prepare the party for revolutionary action. Centralism proved in fact to be the most distinctive feature of the Communist parties, especially as long as Stalin was Secretary General of the Soviet party. The effect of centralism was to turn the party into the party leader's fiefdom and the central committee into his mouthpiece, through which subordinate party bodies were instructed to act in accordance with central committee resolutions. Through the central committee, the general secretary controlled the party, ensuring that elections and resolutions turned out as he intended. The term democratic centralism thus concealed the fact that the party leadership (the central committee/general secretary) dictated its will to the party. Party democracy existed on paper, and as an article of faith among party leaders, but became more and more of an illusion from the late 1920s on.