Issues relating to the NKP were given plenty of space in the Pax leksikon (Pax Encyclopedia), which contains articles on the subject by historians with diverging views. In an article on Furubotn, Knut Einar Eriksen discusses the postwar NKP, claiming that it won about 12% of the electorate partly thanks to what he calls its deradicalisation up to 1948. Eriksen credits Furubotn with a major part in this ``deradicalisation'', and rejects the theory that he was a national Communist. The criterion he establishes for national Communism at that time, he finds in Titoism in Yugoslavia:(53)

Nor did Furubotn become a national Communist as a postwar party leader. In 1945, he was one of the Communists who was most strongly opposed to a merger with the Labour Party. Nor did he try to lead the NKP in the direction in which Tito was taking the Yugoslav Communist Party. Until he was purged from the NKP in 1950, Moscow was his guiding star.

Einart Lorenz

The article on the NKP in the Pax leksikon is by Einhart Lorenz, author of a number of major works on the Norwegian labour movement from the 1800s to the present. In contrast to the other historians, Lorenz sees the disagreements within the NKP from 1945 to 1950 as being concerned with relations to Moscow:(54)

The clash was over the contradictions between the political platform from the pre-war years and the new theories which had developed during the occupation. The point of departure for Furubotn's policies was Norwegian independence, whereas Løvlien believed that Furubotn's policies were neglecting the class struggle.

Lorenz regards Furubotn's leadership of the NKP as a deviation from the Moscow tradition, and claims that after the party showdown in 1949 the NKP again became ``a faithful and dogmatic spokesman for the Soviet Union and Stalinism''.(55) Both Eriksen's and Lorenz's articles are too ``lexical'' and concise for evaluation here.

``Arbeiderbevegelsens historie i Norge'' (the history of the labour movement in Norway)

The problem of the NKP in 1949 is dealt with in both volume 4 and volume 5 of this comprehensive work on the history of the labour movement in Norway. Volume 5 appeared first in 1987. It is by Trond Bergh and discusses the 1949-50 crisis. He produces no new material and narrates the events without emphasising either domestic or foreign causes of the 1949 crisis.(56) Tore Pryser considers the problems around Furubotn more closely in volume 4, which covers the period from 1935 to 1946. He points out that Furubotn was out of step with the NKP leadership as early as in the autumn of 1940.(57) Contradicting the widely-held view that Furubotn obeyed Moscow directives during the merger negotiations between the NKP and the Norwegian Labour Party in 1945, Pryser says that Furubotn himself had good reason to break off the negotiations:(58)

In view of Furubotn's poor relations with the Soviet Union both before and during the war, it is difficult to imagine that he would have been more inclined in 1945 to bow to Moscow's dictates.