At the conference, elections to party offices provoked violent disagreements and to the emergence of almost a state of war between the two wings. The controversy peaked over Just Lippe. Furubotn did his utmost to prevent him from attending the conference, even to the extent of having a letter read out in which he accused Lippe of representing what he called an illegal Secret Service group in the party. Lippe, he claimed, was the head of the group, which had ``for some time poisoned the party environment and reduced the party's working capacity''.(88) Furubotn gave no further reason for his remarkable accusation. He had based his move on the charges alleged to have been made against Lippe by Moscow; this gave him an excellent opportunity to incapacitate one of his most serious rivals from the pre-war NKP, even if in a blatant show of power. The letter can be regarded as Furubotn's request to the 1946 conference for a vote of confidence, and on this matter he received one. A unanimous election committee also nominated him for general secretary, although he accepted only under pressure from the committee chairman.(89) The conference followed the committee's recommendation, with only 11 of the 340 delegates voting against Furubotn.(90) Emil Løvlien was elected party chairman, and Roald Halvorsen deputy chairman. In other respects, Furubotn ``lost'' at the conference. His exclusion of Lippe had done little to help him, as Arbeiderbladet was the first to note. On 12^th June it devoted a leader to the matter:

When the Negro has served his purpose, he is released. The so-called war-Communists are no exception.

A leaderless party?

Leading Furubotn men like Ørnulf Egge and Adelstein Haugen had to leave the central executive.(91) Kjell Grude Kviberg was dismissed as editor of Friheten in favour of the 1923 veteran Jørgen Vogt. The ``old Communists'' won a majority in the central executive, the highest authority between conferences. But in its management of day-to-day party affairs the central secretariat had an important part to play, and here the Furubotn wing still occupied the most important positions.

The situation, which emerges, appears abnormal in the light of later NKP developments. In Furubotn the party had a strong ``president'', i.e. general secretary, while there was an anti-Furubotn majority in the ``government'', i.e. the central executive. The ``administration'' though, i.e. the party secretariat, was under Furubotn's control. Add to this that there was no definite ``constitution'': the party had uttered no statement of principles. Party policy would have to be the sum of what the leadership arrived at, in other words of the acts and resolutions of the ``president'', the administration'', and the ``government''. The difficulty was that this machinery no longer constituted a unit - but that was something of which the 1946 conference was unaware, because Furubotn's opponents did not express any political or ideological opposition, witness Løvlien's opening address. Its main message was a firm declaration of confidence in Furubotn personally and in his policies; in it he stamped the party's policy during and after the war with the authority of numerous quotations from Furubotn.(92) At the NKP`s extraordinary conference in 1950, Løvlien admitted that he had supported Furubotn's political line after the war, saying that he had failed to see through the ``mistaken'' policies which had been approved by ``the whole party'' (p. 26 of the conference minutes). With hindsight, we can see that Furubotn's opponents used the same tactics as he had adopted previously in difficult situations: express verbal support for those who appear to be most strongly placed politically, in order to preserve your position for future struggles.