Previously published in Labor History 1997, p. 159.

Doctoral Thesis Defense on the Given Topic at the University of Bergen, Friday, November 22, 1996.

By communism here, we mean the communist parties from the formation of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1919 to Stalin's death in 1953. It was customary for these parties during this period to be under the ultimate leadership of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow, the CPSU.

The study of communist parties was challenging until the opening of the archives in Moscow in 1992 since there was relatively little accessible original written source material from the parties themselves. Most of the material consisted of so-called propagandistic sources, which included documents and resolutions from official party bodies or the open communist press. Through a rich collection of autobiographical books by former communists dating back to the 1930s, there was reason to believe that the real life within the parties and the relationship with Moscow differed from what the party's official sources conveyed.

Oral Sources and the History of Communism

The majority of Western literature on communist parties until the 1970s was largely speculative in nature. The primary reason for this was the lack of "authentic" sources, meaning reliable written sources. The emergence of the so-called oral history movement in the 1960s opened up new avenues for the study of communist history. Researchers began using audio recorders and film equipment to gather information about the "real" life within the communist movement. Edvard Bull Jr., the Norwegian pioneer in working with oral sources, described this source category as follows:

The narratives we now call oral sources are created by historians ... for scholarly purposes. Therefore, we know much more about how the sources have come into being than historians usually know about other sources. Thus, we have greater opportunities to assess their credibility. ii

Researchers attempting to shed light on communist history through oral sources often faced challenges, especially when sensitive issues arose, such as the question of remote control from Moscow. Typically, information in this field was thin, based on few informants, and lacked origins in written sources.

Opposition from "traditional" historians quickly surfaced. They could to some extent accept oral sources regarding social conditions, such as dietary habits and housing arrangements—concrete phenomena. However, they believed that thoughts and actions—abstract phenomena—were difficult to reveal in their original form from people's memories. iii New perspectives would alter the original thought processes; they would have a "retroactive" effect and "reshape" the original, real memories—especially in controversial political matters. Those involved in collecting memories of communism in this situation recognized these objections as so significant that they began to study each individual communist party from a comparative perspective: where there were "blank spots" in one communist party, they could "compensate" if these "spots" were "filled" in other communist parties. Such an approach still carried an element of speculation, but it could be attempted because the structures of communist parties across Europe were fairly similar.

Methodological Criticisms of Oral Sources in the Study of Communism

The fundamental methodological criticisms against the use of oral sources in the study of communism can be categorized into two main areas. The first objection came from other academic historians who did not rely on oral sources. They argued that one could not trust oral sources when it came to political matters, especially when researchers couldn't cross-reference the information from informants with written materials.

The second objection came from those who conducted the interviews themselves, usually because the interview methods had to be borrowed from other established fields such as folklore and social anthropology. Oral sources do not merely recount "events" but often convey "narratives" about the past. If there are networks of close informants or groups of fairly homogeneous informants, they tend to refine events over time and fit them into "explanatory" patterns. In short, events that the individual did not personally experience but heard from another are "idealized" and adapted to a "logical" narrative that aligns with the expectations of a particular political, religious, or ethnic environment. This idealization is often meant to justify actions and thoughts in the past and legitimize the continued existence of the group or movement.

In Norway, folklorist Anne Eriksen has most clearly addressed this type of issue. In her book "Det var noe annet under krigen" (It Was Something Different During the War), she shows how the anti-Nazi victors in Norway established a dominant collective tradition about the war. The narrative of the resistance can be seen as a myth akin to folktales through its simplification of the Nazis as the "evil" and the resistance fighters as the "good."

Historical works on the resistance movement up to that point have only represented a small and more nuanced part of this "narrative." Primarily, it is the older participants themselves who have promoted and maintained this "narrative" through anniversaries, monuments, memorial books, and so on. Teachers, television series, and prominent cultural figures embed this narrative into the general population and new generations, making it a collective memory. For Anne Eriksen, the crucial point is not how true or untrue this narrative is, but that it is "a culturally constructed and collectively maintained image of the past." iii The oral source—the living actor—often legitimizes this "culturally created ... image of the past."

Methodological Issues with Oral Sources

Historian Knut Helle expresses general methods for studying history as follows:

"[...] historical reality, the past, is gone forever... But it has left traces, remnants, products that we can still study. Based on or in accordance with such 'sources,' the historian forms an image of the past..."

In principle, oral sources do not differ from written ones. They are also "remnants" we can study, whether we capture them on audio recordings or film. They are, as historian Knut Kjeldstadli puts it, "scattered pieces from the past" - which, as a methodological principle, should be transformed into a meaningful and "realistic image of how it was... What is the basis for so-called historical facts?"

As researchers of oral sources, we face two main methodological challenges:

1. Determining the credibility of the individual informant regarding specific events in the past.
2. Determining the credibility of the individual informant in conveying thoughts and political attitudes from the past—often expressed in the form of "narratives" about the past (a culturally constructed and collectively maintained image of the past...).

We must also be aware that there can be an interaction between these two aspects, often in the sense that the informant consciously or unconsciously filters out events/incidents that do not align with the narrative/collective tradition they represent. This problem needs to be emphasized, especially since an oral source typically speaks about events that happened a long time ago. The sources may have undergone changes in political beliefs, which can affect their memory process. iii However, this is not a necessary conclusion. Øivind Vestheim concluded in 1981:

"It is very interesting that in my source material, there is a significant correlation between retrospective (looking back) and contemporary data concerning the informants' political views..." iv

The Goal and Material for This Lecture

In this lecture, we will focus on the two aforementioned methodological main challenges in oral sources when studying communism, specifically in the context of Norwegian communism—an element of the history of the Norwegian Communist Party (NKP).

Because the use of oral sources is individual-related, based on an individual's memory, I will select a key informant and evaluate his information from the two aforementioned perspectives:

1. Credibility regarding events.
2. Credibility regarding thoughts.

Based on these two methodological principles, I will attempt to reconstruct "the past reality and the history as knowledge of thoughts." i "I will use Peder Furubotn as the subject, the General Secretary of the NKP for a long time in the 1920s and 1940s. The focus will be on periods where there were scarce written sources, as I began studying communism from the late 1960s. To explore the "unwritten periods," I used oral sources—since I did not have high expectations of finding written documents. I searched for international methodological literature but found little, as the emphasis of "oral history" was primarily on social history. In the realm of "oral political history," one had to be largely self-taught, as a recent review article in The Journal of American History confirms. ii Therefore, the interview setup became extensive and detailed: Even peripheral informants both inside and outside of Norway were approached, and peripheral issues were recorded.

The goal was to capture traces that could "refresh" the memories of former informants or reveal unknown aspects of well-known cases. From 1968 to around 1990, I contacted approximately 250 informants with various political perspectives but sharing a common feature: Almost all of them had direct contact with Furubotn in specific matters since 1905. Nearly 120 sources were recorded on audio tapes, and around 20 on high-quality video recordings. All recordings were preserved and copied, and there are about 4000 A4 pages of transcriptions, allowing for quick reference in relation to the recordings. An unpublished informant key has also been prepared, providing a brief explanation of each informant, including birth data, year of death, social background, political stance, and political "journey" from youth to old age.

The unexpected happens—written confrontation sources emerge... The uniqueness in relation to the oral sources emerged when, from 1992 onwards, I gained access to previously top-secret archives in Moscow, including one of Furubotn's personal files in the Comintern. Several of the episodes I had only heard about from oral informants suddenly appeared in written form—as contemporary documents from 1931, 1937, etc. A situation had arisen where the oral sources could be verified. They had received a kind of "answer key" in Moscow. Even though before 1992, I believed I had a fairly secure basis for some of the key information from the oral sources, I had to look at them in an entirely new light. Previous assumptions might be replaced with the establishment of secure facts—or discarded.

The oral sources suddenly became a supplement to the new written sources. At the same time, they could be used as a control instrument for the written contemporary accounts. Furthermore, an unusual opportunity arose: Could the findings from the new written sources shed light on the value of the long-collected oral sources? Could the previous methodological issues with the collected oral sources be overcome? Could this new source situation lead to new insights into the value of oral sources beyond the study of the history of communism?

Within the time frame of this lecture, it is impossible to delve deeply into this important issue, nor into a systematic study of the chosen informant's information universe. We must select some individual themes that illustrate our issues, and we must consider the situation when the collection of sources began.

The Different Furubotn Narratives

When the collection of interviews began in 1968, right in the midst of the Cold War, I, as a researcher, encountered three relatively homogeneous "narratives" or collective traditions about Peder Furubotn. Within the communist milieu, there existed two clearly opposing Furubotn traditions. One originated from his supporters. It portrayed him as an independent Norwegian communist leader who advocated for a uniquely Norwegian path to socialism—based on Norwegian, rather than Soviet, premises. The positive Furubotn tradition focused on his heroic period, which was the war years of 1940-41, as a whole. These dramatic years formed the basis of the "origin myth" in the Furubotn tradition: during this time, he "understood" why he had to choose a uniquely Norwegian path—and he "consistently" followed it. This became evident in 1940 when, driven by his national mindset, he joined the resistance movement, while the central leadership of the Norwegian Communist Party (NKP) in Oslo followed an accommodating line with the Germans, in line with Soviet wishes. i His national line led to his discredit in Moscow, which was behind his expulsion from the NKP in 1949. Talk of alcoholism and disorderly organizational methods by Furubotn was dismissed as unsubstantiated, rumor-mongering, and disinformation from his opponents.

The negative Furubotn traditions, on the other hand, came from his opponents within the NKP and from outside, mainly based in the Norwegian Labor Party, with Martin Tranmæl and Haakon Lie as key figures. These two negative Furubotn traditions, despite different premises, were surprisingly similar. First, they strongly rejected the notion that Furubotn had advocated for a uniquely Norwegian line. They argued that this was a later invention by him to cover up that he had been the most pro-German member of the NKP in 1940-41. On the contrary, he was more loyal to Moscow than the other communists. Due to his excessively pro-Soviet policies, disorderly organizational practices, and alcohol abuse, his party comrades had to remove him from the party, but they couldn't do so until 1949. The eight years he spent in Moscow from 1930 to 1938 were shrouded in darkness, documentary-wise. The unanimous belief both in the NKP and the Norwegian Labor Party milieu after 1949 was that he had been forcibly sent to Moscow in 1930 due to alcohol problems. The NKP had hidden him away in Moscow so that he wouldn't destroy the party completely—internally through dictatorial methods and externally by compromising it through alcohol abuse. What none of the proponents of this theory seemed to wonder about was that the NKP continued to decline after Furubotn was removed from the NKP in Norway—until the Comintern in 1937 considered dissolving the party.

The New Documents in Moscow Change the Research Situation on Communism

Any researcher who delved into the Furubotn issue before 1992 walked right into a mined field—or more precisely, into a highly controversial topic. Could the use of oral sources clarify this jungle of conflicting views through a focus on the foundations of these different collective traditions and individual events? This was the question before 1992.

When the opportunity to access Moscow documents arose in 1992, I did not have strong expectations of finding a variety of documents to clarify these questions. From the perspective of small-state thinking, it was realistic to expect relatively few documents about the NKP/Furubotn. If they existed, they would likely be found at lower levels in the Soviet party's foreign channels, probably at the intelligence level. These assumptions were quickly proven wrong and primarily created a practical problem. Faced with large and unexpected document piles—often with vague keywords in the archive listings—as well as time pressure for me during relatively short stays in Moscow, an efficient way had to be found to sift through the paperwork.

I initially relied on the memories of some of the informants regarding Furubotn's stay in Moscow from 1930-38. I first revisited the claims of Henry Aas, a communist from Stord, because he was one of those who adhered to the negative Furubotn tradition after 1949. He could not be counted among those who would "embellish" Furubotn's stay in Moscow. Henry Aas had been a student at the so-called Lenin School in Moscow in 1930-31. He said that he had noticed that Furubotn fell out of favor due to his views on what Aas called the national question. Aas's memory on this point was very vague. He could not specify what the disagreements were about. It was not difficult to understand. He belonged to the student group at the Lenin School, i.e., to the communist "foot soldiers." Henry Aas did not have the insights of the foreign communist elite in Moscow. From the perspective of traditional source-critical criteria, his comments were almost worthless to build on. However, it was likely that he had picked up fragments of discussions from higher levels in the Comintern. Furthermore, there were three other informants who had information in the same vein: Furubotn himself, the Danish communist Kai Molkte, and the Norwegian-Swedish young communist Rodny Öhman—who was in Moscow at the time. I

Episode Number 1 – From the Year 1931

At that moment, I had a choice to make: If I adhered to the negative Furubotn traditions, this information would be considered unreliable. Furubotn was not in Moscow due to political deviations but because of alcohol problems. Or should I take the mentioned informants seriously? When I stood in front of the registers and index cards in Moscow, I might finally have the opportunity to clarify this issue—right? I chose to follow the information from Henry Aas and requested material related to the Lenin School in 1931. In the very first file, I found a list of teaching staff at the Lenin School, including their salaries, etc. Furubotn was listed as a teacher "in the national question." Here lay the first verification of what Aas had told me in 1968, almost 40 years after the event. After much insistence with the archivists in Moscow, I was given access to Furubotn's personal file. In it, I found a Russian-language summary of a meeting at the so-called Western University in November 1931. It revealed a discussion where Furubotn was first criticized for deviations in the national question. When he did not back down but launched a counterattack, the faculty dismissed him as a teacher. Forty voted to remove him, one opposed, and two abstained. Thus, Aas's vague oral memory had received written confirmation: There was enough material to say that Furubotn "fell out of favor."

What was the cause of the "fall from grace" and the subsequent punishment?

The challenge was to determine the nature of this "fall from grace." According to Furubotn's recollection, it involved him being assigned to a furniture factory as an ordinary laborer. According to the negative Furubotn tradition, the reason behind this was Furubotn's alcohol abuse. Up to this point, the new documents had undermined the alcoholism explanation as the sole explanation, which had been the cornerstone of the negative Furubotn tradition regarding the reasons for Furubotn's stay in Moscow. Both the negative and positive Furubotn traditions agreed on his time at the furniture factory as a form of punishment, but they differed on the reasons for the punishment. When I directly questioned Furubotn about the year he worked at the furniture factory, he couldn't recall it. I attempted to solve this mystery using other sources, but my efforts were in vain. Personally, in 1975, I believed that Furubotn was assigned to factory work after the 1935 Comintern Congress. According to information available at that time regarding positions in the Comintern and NKP (Norwegian Communist Party), Furubotn held the lowest status in the formal Comintern hierarchy starting in 1935. Furubotn did not consider 1936 an improbable year, and I mistakenly documented 1936 as the year of Furubotn's reassignment from political Comintern work to factory labor.

After the opening of the Moscow archives, this 1975 dating took on new significance. While pursuing leads related to Henry Aas, I uncovered new material, over 250 pages transcribed in German, concerning a political confrontation with Furubotn in the Comintern's Scandinavian Secretariat in September 1931. This discovery was unexpected since none of the informants had mentioned this specific confrontation, including Furubotn himself. These numerous pages depicted Furubotn as a "silent saboteur" primarily responsible for political mistakes within the NKP until 1930. When he refused to yield to the complaints and instead began to argue his case, the discussions in Moscow came to a temporary halt until he was accused of alcohol abuse. This accusation served as the means by which Furubotn admitted to having certain flaws as a labor leader from Norway. He suddenly "confessed" to certain political mistakes. iii However, the matter was far from closed. It went all the way to the top of the Comintern. At a larger international meeting in the so-called Political Secretariat in October, Furubotn underwent further scrutiny. This was followed by a secret resolution from the Comintern Secretariat on November 11, 1931, which stipulated that he would be assigned to a factory in 1932. Around the same time, the Western University dismissed Furubotn from his teaching position. The resolution that removed him revealed that he had once again committed political "errors." Moving forward to the year 1937, we find new documents where Furubotn confronted the Comintern leadership. Otto W. Kuusinen, a close associate of Stalin, labeled him a factionalist and threatened to pursue him for his criticism.

Documents in the Moscow archive confirmed in 1992 that the negative Furubotn tradition was accurate in one respect—the issue of Furubotn's alcohol problem. However, it had overlooked the central issue: Furubotn had been politically unacceptable to the Comintern leadership since 1931. The primary concern of the Comintern could be associated with a documented aspect from both oral and, post-1992, written sources: the national question. Furubotn emphasized Norwegian factors more than the Comintern considered desirable (given the scope of this lecture, I do not find it appropriate to delve into the details of "politically unacceptable" or "Norwegian factors").

Henceforth, the issue of alcohol should not be labeled as irrelevant but rather as less relevant. Furubotn's opponent, Just Lippe, enjoyed relaying a comment from Otto W. Kuusinen: "It's not that Comrade Furubotn drinks more than the rest of us, but when he drinks, all of Moscow shakes!" v The point being that alcohol problems were common among the leaders and apparatus of the Comintern. The Danish communist leader Kai Moltke likely captured the essence of the alcohol issue within the Comintern:

"An assessment of such a case depends on, and depended on – especially in Moscow during this period – not so much on the actual content and risk of the case but on who did it..."

Sub-conclusion - Oral and Written Sources on Furubotn's Deposition in 1931.

It is time for a sub-conclusion. Prior to the accessibility of the Moscow archives in 1992, it was only through oral sources that we were able to ascertain that political discrepancies could have been the primary reason for Furubotn's removal in Moscow. Since the period from 1930 to 1938 was nearly devoid of internal, original communist contemporaneous sources for Furubotn, there were some methodological challenges with the oral sources that provided information about him:

1. General skepticism toward oral informants.
2. Doubt regarding their credibility due to imprecise information content.
3. Discrepancies in the oral source base, reflected in both a positive and a negative collective tradition regarding Furubotn.

These methodological challenges posed by the oral sources on Norwegian communism in 1931 did not disappear with access to the Moscow archives in 1992. Controversial topics and low precision levels among informants will always present methodological challenges to researchers. It is not always certain that these problems can be resolved satisfactorily. However, research conclusions based on such oral sources can still be fact-based. The Moscow archives provided written documents that confirmed my conclusions from 1975, despite the thin source base at that time, which could be criticized. The assertion that alcohol abuse was the sole explanation for Furubotn's fall from grace can now definitively be labeled as a central and myth-forming component of the previously dominant negative Furubotn "narrative." This does not mean that the oral information about Furubotn's alcohol abuse was groundless. However, the political reasons in this "narrative" had been "blurred," and the alcohol problem had been exaggerated to the point of being unrecognizable. Thus, the Moscow archive confirms the oral sources, which, albeit on a thin basis, asserted that Furubotn fell from grace due to political discrepancies.

Episode number 2 – from the year 1949

The major topic of discussion concerning Norwegian communism after the war is tied to Furubotn's expulsion in 1949: Was it a matter settled on Norwegian soil, or was the Soviet Union behind it? We have previously mentioned the negative and positive Furubotn traditions on this matter. As an informant, Furubotn insisted that it was the Soviets who were the masterminds behind Johan Strand Johansen and Emil Løvlien during the NKP's reckoning in 1949. Furubotn recounted a specific episode in this regard. He couldn't recall the exact timing, but he believed it occurred before the formation of Cominform in 1947. This episode was supposed to involve the Swedish communist leader Sven Linderot coming to him on Ljan and informing him that the Soviet Communist Party (SUKP) had urged the Swedish Communist Party (SK) to participate in a campaign against him. In 1971, at the age of 81, Furubotn recounted:

"But Sven Linderot was here on Ljan for a whole day, and he informed me about the whole thing. But what accusation did the Russians have against me back then? It was so simple: it was that my nature was such that I wouldn't follow the decisions they made. And they were right. I discussed this with Linderot. But Linderot had come to the conclusion that given the way the political developments were - if I got into Parliament and truly showed myself as a proper communist from the Parliament's podium - Moscow would say: 'No, we must keep him, even though he's Satan's firstborn...' In any case, they would say: 'We must postpone that matter...'"

As an informant, Furubotn is clearly a central oral primary source here. However, up until 1992, he was the only one who had provided such information, and he was clearly a party to the matter. His information was also methodologically problematic, as the other "witness" – Sven Linderot – had passed away by this time. When I had published three volumes of a biography about Furubotn 1890–1945 until 1977, strong, critical voices were raised against Furubotn as an informant. In particular, the well-known political actor Torolv Solheim reacted to my use of Furubotn as a source:

"That the author elicits an underlying inferiority complex and personal belittling from the victim (...) (Furubotn), was to be expected. No one can expect an eighty-year-old man to be immune to senile quirks..."

At that time, however, I still considered it likely that Furubotn's information was mostly correct. But for methodological reasons, I could not use it to clarify the NKP settlement in 1949, and I did not use it in my work. Based on the prevailing negative Furubotn traditions in both political and historical circles, I also knew that I would appear tendentious and unprofessional as a researcher if I used this "partisan statement."

The main problem for me was that I could not find other primary sources that could verify or refute Linderot's visit to Furubotn. The crucial part of the episode – Linderot's visit – relied solely on Furubotn's assertion. As long as Furubotn couldn't date the episode, it could at worst be a false memory – at best, a recollection shift. Furubotn's claim that Linderot had warned him about a Soviet move against him could be related to previous situations, such as when Linderot attended the NKP's national convention in 1946. In that case, the information shed no light on what happened in 1949. The information appeared so uncertain that I set it aside.

But after questioning the Swedish historian Lars Björlin, I learned that he was in the process of gaining access to Sven Linderot's personal file in Moscow in 1994–95. I asked if he could check if there were any documents about a Furubotn-Linderot meeting in Ljan after 1945, possibly related to Furubotn as a candidate for parliament. Based on my own findings from the Presidential Archive in Moscow in 1995, I was somewhat skeptical that this visit could have occurred after 1948. In Moscow in December 1948, Linderot did not appear to be Furubotn's friend unless Linderot's words were constructed by NKVD or SUKP personnel. In any case, Linderot had provided information to the SUKP leadership that Furubotn was a Nordic Tito. Furubotn "was" a communist Bonaparte tired of megalomania, and he wanted to control Nordic communism in a Titoist way. Supporters of Furubotn perceived him as the greatest Marxist in Western Europe. Furubotn could "infect" the entire communist movement and thus be a threat to Stalin. Despite this dramatic anti-Furubotn testimony attributed to Linderot, I could not pass up the opportunity Björlin gave me to verify Furubotn's claim of friendship with Linderot.

Björlin did, in fact, find documents that indicated Linderot visited Furubotn. Firstly, we obtained a reliable date: it happened in August 1949. This information was based on a Soviet summary of a conversation with the Norwegian Håvard Langseth, dated March 6, 1950. Langseth had recounted that the NKP discussion about the parliamentary candidates for the autumn 1949 election had proceeded without debate, as the majority in the party leadership nominated those who had topped the lists in 1945. But when Linderot "visited Oslo in mid-August," there was unrest:

After reading and approving Furubotn's brochure and article "Norway shall live and have a future as a nation!" as an election platform, Linderot suggested nominating Furubotn as the first candidate in Oslo instead of Strand Johansen. The majority did not accept this line of thinking.

Additionally, there is a conversation note from December 1951. In materials from the Soviet Foreign Ministry, the Swede Paul Söderman informed about disagreements in the then-Swedish communist leadership. Söderman reported that the well-known Swedish communist Gunnar Öhman complained that Sven Linderot was a Titoist:

Öhman justified his words by claiming that Linderot had traveled to Norway two months before the split in the NKP and had some meetings with Furubotn. No one knows anything about the content of these conversations with Furubotn...

Based on these two written sources, quite contemporaneous, and from information from two different contemporary informants, one Norwegian (Langseth) and one Swedish (Söderman), we can establish with certainty that Furubotn and Linderot met in 1949. The month was August, as indicated by Söderman's dating – "two months before the split in the NKP." The split occurred in October 1949, two months earlier – that was August.

Discussion of oral and written sources about the meeting between Furubotn and Linderot in 1949

Findings in Sven Linderot's personal file in Moscow show that Furubotn and Linderot met in August 1949 and that one of Linderot's topics was to get Furubotn at the top of NKP's Oslo list for the 1949 parliamentary election. Furubotn's interview statements from 1971 now gain new significance. The timing – which Furubotn couldn't remember – now appears to be in place. His claim that Linderot wanted him at the top of the parliamentary list is also verified. Thus, we have established the episode itself as a fact, both from oral and written sources.

What remains to be clarified is Furubotn's reference to Linderot's attitudes and thoughts from 1949: that Linderot informed him that the Soviets wanted SKP to take action against Furubotn, meaning that a Soviet move against Furubotn was already in preparation in August 1949. Furubotn's precaution, according to Linderot, was to publicly assert himself as a "true" communist – by entering the Norwegian Parliament. Here we are faced with two choices: one is to accept Furubotn's information in this regard, as his credibility in this matter is strengthened by the findings in Linderot's Moscow file. The other is to accept Furubotn's thought account only as the actual exchange of thoughts that took place between the two Scandinavian communist leaders. This would mean that we – in that case – cannot say that Linderot's fear was based on anything other than pure political "Fingerspitzengefühl," i.e., intuition or speculation that the Soviet request was more than a random SUKP move. The content of his fear could thus be nil, but Furubotn's retelling of the conversation between the two – correct.

Furubotn's memory also does not clarify the actual motive behind Linderot's proposal: was it sincere because he feared Soviet intervention against himself at this time and needed Furubotn as an ally? Or was he trying to lure Furubotn into a Soviet trap – to give the Soviets direct or indirect opportunities to intervene in an unacceptable leadership struggle in NKP about the top position on the Oslo list? Linderot's Moscow file tells us that he was suspected of being a Titoist in 1949. A Soviet document from September 1951 testifies to Linderot's sympathy for Furubotn. Junior clerk Iljin wrote by hand:

In mid-February 1950, I accompanied Linderot and his wife to Sochi for a vacation. In the railway car, when they were drunk ... Linderot began talking about the split in NKP. He said that there was a mistake made in the question of Peder Furubotn's exclusion from NKP. According to Comrade Linderot, Furubotn probably made some mistakes, but overall, he is an honest man. In connection with this, it must be pointed out that Sven Linderot in the summer of 1949, even though he was ill, specifically went to Oslo and strongly urged the NKP leadership to place Peder Furubotn at the top of the parliamentary list for the 1949 election – instead of Strand Johansen. As one knows, this recommendation from Sven Linderot was rejected.

Because Soviet and Stalinist methods were like a Matryoshka doll, i.e., a doll within a doll within a doll, we cannot completely rule out that Linderot's proposal was a Soviet provocation. I find such an interpretation to be unlikely, especially given Linderot's statement on the way to Sochi in February 1950. In addition, an important document in his Soviet personal file – which states that he was in the Soviet Union from October 1949 to February 1950 – contradicts this idea. He was, in other words, in the Soviet Union when Strand Johansen triggered the Furubotn conflict in NKP. Could it have been entirely coincidental that the Soviets had Linderot in the Soviet Union while the NKP confrontation was raging, and Furubotn was being accused of the most grotesque charges, such as being an American agent, Trotskyist, Titoist, Gestapo agent, etc.? Did SUKP fear that Linderot might somehow show solidarity with Furubotn – since he probably had refused to initiate a confrontation with him in the summer of 1949? Danish party leader Aksel Larsen, on the other hand, actively intervened and helped Løvlien purge Furubotn supporters from NKP.

My conclusion is that Furubotn's account of the content of the meeting between him and Linderot in 1949 appears credible:

1. Primarily based on the three written documents found in Sven Linderot's personal file in Moscow.
2. Based on other oral information given by Furubotn, information about his Moscow stay from 1930 to 1938 – memories that were up to 50 years old in 1981. The point is that this information has been verified:
   a) By other oral informants independent of him, especially informants who were political opponents of him after 1949 when the various collective traditions about Furubotn took shape.
   b) By several documents in the Moscow archive, including documents from the year 1931.

Based on this assessment of Furubotn's testimonial value, we can say that in August 1949, Furubotn had good reason to believe that the Soviets were planning a move against him. However, he probably did not know the form of such a move or when it might occur. What Linderot told him could indicate that such a move could be avoided unless Linderot overestimated Furubotn's chances of appearing as an acceptable communist in Moscow's eyes. I tend to believe that Linderot's proposal was based on such an overestimation.

If we bring in the few documents we have from the Presidential Archive from 1949, the letter from Grigoryan, the head of the International Department, to Stalin from August 6, 1949, becomes interesting in this Linderot context. In this letter to Stalin, Furubotn was complained about for "principled factionalism." Grigoryan proposed that Løvlien should be called to Moscow for discussions about the situation in NKP. This earlier top-secret letter suggests that Linderot may have indeed learned that the Soviets were preparing to remove Furubotn from the NKP leadership. However, Linderot had hardly assumed anything concrete about how this would happen, except that it could occur through a Nordic communist party. It was not the first time that the Soviets had removed a communist leader outside the Soviet Union through other Western communist leaders. The removal of USA General Secretary Earl Browder in 1946 began with attacks from French communist leader Jacques Duclos.

Conclusion on the Meeting between Furubotn and Linderot

In summary, Furubotn's interview account of his meeting with Linderot in 1949 provides another piece of evidence supporting the hypothesis that the NKP's internal struggle in the autumn of 1949 was initiated by the Soviet Union. Despite the methodological challenges associated with using him as an oral source, his account represented a unique thread that revealed the connection between Furubotn and Linderot. Without Furubotn's recollection, this crucial meeting between the two Scandinavian communist leaders in 1949 might never have been discovered or given importance.

Torolv Solheim and others had cautioned me against "relying on - and I would add: entrusting a tape recorder - statements from an octogenarian about political events and individuals that occurred approximately half a century ago." They argued that an octogenarian would likely not be "immune to senile tendencies." However, doubts about Furubotn's information being confused fragments from a senile elderly person were dispelled following the opening of the Moscow archives in 1992.

Conclusions Regarding Methodological Challenges in Oral Sources for the Study of Communism's History

In essence, we must acknowledge the existence of particular methodological challenges when dealing with oral sources, especially when there are no available written records. What makes the study of communism's history unique is the veil of secrecy that shrouded the histories of these parties until Moscow opened its archives for scrutiny in 1992. This tradition of secrecy resulted in controversial episodes in communist history being kept hidden, partly through party discipline, which demanded silence on certain facts, and partly due to the nonexistence or inaccessibility of documents. Consequently, researchers in this field before 1992 were often compelled to rely on oral sources. However, it is an illusion to believe that methodological challenges in dealing with oral sources disappear, even when written contemporaneous sources emerge. The methodological issues persist and apply equally to written sources.

The key point here is that the post-1992 discoveries in Moscow archives have either corroborated some of the oral sources collected 20-30 years ago or undermined their credibility. In this lecture, I have focused on examining Furubotn's reliability as a source for certain aspects of Norwegian communist history. Despite his sometimes poor memory of dates and the fact that we often had only his partisan version of events, spot checks in Moscow documents have shown that he possesses a high degree of credibility as a central oral source for Norwegian communist history.

Even though the oral sources I have employed in this case stem from a specific context, these findings have broader implications, underscoring that oral sources, despite their methodological challenges, are crucial for obtaining factual knowledge about political attitudes - abstract phenomena - in the past. Had there been no written sources in Moscow or if they had never become accessible or had been destroyed, erroneous perceptions about Norwegian communist history would have become "truth." This would have been particularly dramatic in the case of Peder Furubotn, a long-serving leader in Norwegian communism's history, who would likely have been remembered in history as a super-Stalinist drunkard and a senile old man. Interviews with him and his supporters would have been regarded as almost worthless.

The Moscow archives have debunked this Norwegian myth-making, which marginalized the value of Furubotn informants as sources. Moreover, they have demonstrated that oral sources can be of fundamental importance in writing a balanced and realistic history. Collecting oral information from informants who are marginalized or stigmatized by the "spirit of the times" can, therefore, be or become crucial checks on historical environments that rely solely on conventional written sources.

The study of communism's problematic history through oral sources has legitimized the high value of such sources in reconstructing not only events but also political attitudes from 40 to 60 years ago. The discovery of the "answer key" in the Moscow archives in 1992 shows that there was already a basis in 1981 for me to write as I did at the time:

"We can certainly say that a historian working in periods where oral sources exist diminishes the scientific value of their research if they do not incorporate oral sources... They may also easily distort history by excluding perhaps pivotal sources."

In this regard, one could say about contemporary history: "Without oral history - no history."