Along the same lines as the Soviet party, the Communist parties had thus developed the tradition that the national party leadership was the highest party authority and the centre of its power structure. This development can also clearly be seen in the NKP of the 1920`s. Party debate was limited to a small circle of leaders in Oslo and remained largely inaccessible to ordinary party members.

For a Communist to have any hope of making divergent views known, he either had to have a seat in the leading body or a representative there. This was also true of the NKP, despite the lack of any international Communist Party organisation like the Comintern from 1943 to 1947.

The NKP statutes - the key to the party's chain of command

The NKP's statutes and programmes were to be laid down at national conferences. The last conference before the war was held in 1936. Up to 1949, when Furubotn was excluded, the party held the following conferences:

1.     An extraordinary conference in September 1945

2.     A conference in June 1946

3.     A conference in February 1949.

No sources are available to indicate whether or not the extraordinary conference in 1945 dealt with statutes, but it seems unlikely; documents from the 1946 conference appear to show, for instance in the names of the party's leading bodies, that up to then the NKP was adhering to its 1936 statutes. The new party statutes proposed in 1946(76) still used the term central committee as the name of the party's highest authority between conferences. But the 1946 conference amended the proposal, adopting instead a division of power in the party leadership, between

the national committee - the highest authority between conferences, and

the central committee - ``the national committee's executive body''.(77)

Another important instrument of power was the control committee, intended to function as a cross between a party tribunal and an instrument of surveillance between conferences. Conference also elected the party chairman, the deputy chairman, the editor of the leading party newspaper (Friheten) and the general secretary. The party chairman was among other things chairman of the central committee. The draft statutes prepared by the NKP's organisational secretariat in March, 1946, i.e. about three months before the conference, also contained detailed guidelines for the party secretariat, the number of members of which was to be decided by the central committee. The secretariat was to administer its own work, but the appointments to it would be made by the central committee. The party chairman was also to be chairman of the secretariat. The statutes ultimately adopted contain no special guidelines for the secretariat. It has proved impossible to find source material bearing on this, but we do know that the secretariat existed and functioned. The absence of written guidelines may suggest that the 1946 conference wished to avoid giving the secretariat too much formal power: the considerable tensions in the party were already finding expression. Conspicuous by their absence from both the proposed and the adopted statutes are any guidelines for the office of general secretary. Did that mean that the party had two leaders, or that one of them - the general secretary or the chairman - had greater power than the other?