page_title: Communist Party of Norway
section_title: Background, establishment  , and pre-war era
hierarchical_section_title: Communist Party of Norway / History / Background, establishment  , and pre-war era
caption_attribution_description: Adam Egede-Nissen
context_page_description: The Communist Party of Norway is a small Marxist–Leninist communist party in Norway.
  It was formed in 1923, following a split in the Norwegian Labour Party. The party was pro-Stalinist from its establishment and as such supported the Soviet Union and its government, while opposing Trotskyism. Although in the 1950s, the party formally denounced Stalinism and kept itself only to Marx and Lenin. During the Second World War, the party initially opposed active resistance, due to the non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany. After Germany terminated the pact and entered into war with the Soviet Union, the Communist Party of Norway engaged in resistance to the German occupation, and the party experienced a brief period of political popularity in some segments of society in the years immediately after the war. The popular support quickly waned with the onset of the Cold War, and the Labour Party took a harsh line against the communists, culminating in Prime Minister Einar Gerhardsen's Kråkerøy speech in 1948, in which he condemned the Communist Party.
  Since the late 1940s, the party has played a mostly marginal role in Norwegian politics.
context_section_description: The Norwegian Labour Party (DNA) became a member of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1919 under the leadership of Martin Tranmæl. While Tranmæl at first supported the move of becoming a Comintern member, he became increasingly skeptical of it after the proclamation of the twenty-one conditions which stated that members had to enforce democratic centralism and party discipline. Even so, Tranmæl continued to support the Labour Party's membership, even if that meant a future split within the party between the left and the right. A split occurred, based on factional lines, in 1921 and led to the establishment of the Social Democratic Labour Party. A power struggle soon erupted between the Tranmælists and the supporters of Olav Scheflo, the party's parliamentary leader, following Kyrre Grepp's sickness leave and later death in 1922. The reason for the struggle was that Tranmæl wanted to block Grepp's chance of becoming the party's next leader; Grepp was a supporter of the Comintern-line.
  By the time of the 4th World Congress of the Comintern, in which a policy of strengthening the apparatus of the member parties took place, Tranmæl had enough of what he saw as the Comintern's meddling in the internal affairs of the Labour Party. He managed to get a majority within the Central Board for a withdrawal of its Comintern membership, but the Comintern's representative, Karl Radek, managed, with a bit of maneuvering, to get the majority of the party's National Board to vote in favour of retaining its Comintern membership. Before the Labour Party conference in February 1921, Tranmæl came up with the Kristiania-proposal, a declaration of semi-independence from Comintern. The Kristiania-proposal supported retaining membership in the Comintern, if the Labour Party could operate on more independent lines. At the conference a majority, by a margin of two votes, voted in favour of the Kristiania-proposal. The Comintern representative at the party conference, Nikolai Bukharin, grudgingly accepted the vote. The power struggle between the Tranmælists and the Scheflo-wing continued, even more aggressively, until the extraordinary party conference of November 1923 which voted in favour of withdrawing the Labour Party from the Comintern. As a reaction, the Scheflo-wing left the party and established the Norwegian Communist Party. Organisationally, the Communist Party continued the representation of Norway in the Comintern.
  13 of the Labour members of parliament joined the Communist Party, as did large parts of the trade union opposition to the Labour Party. The newly established party elected Sverre Støstad as chairman, Halvard Olsen as deputy chairman, and Peder Furubotn as general secretary. The party managed to gain 6.1 percent of the votes in the 1924 parliamentary election, but decreased to 4 percent in 1927, and decreased further in 1930 to 1.7 percent of the votes. At the same time, its membership slowly decreased, and by the 1930s the party had lost much of its former influence.
  The 1924 election was a failure for the party; the party became the third largest left-wing party, behind the Labour Party and the Social Democratic Labour Party. The Communist Party had failed to restrengthened the Comintern organisation in Norway after the 1923-split. The 1925 conference focused on the party's organisational structure; the Comintern had laid out the party's organisational structure. The structure proposed by the Comintern was duly accepted by a majority at the conference.
  Parallel to its decreasing electoral influence, the party was ravaged by internal strifes. Halvard Olsen and other trade union leaders left the party in 1924, in protest over the trade union policy of the Communist Party. Sverre Støstad, Fredrik Monsen, and Olav Larssen were excluded from the party in 1927 because of disagreements surrounding the reunification of Labour Party (which merged with the Social Democratic Labour Party). Jeanette Olsen, Emil Stang, Jr., and Scheflo left the party in 1928, as they were disappointed with how the Communist Party reacted towards
caption: Adam Egede-Nissen was the party's chairman from 1934 to 1946, even if he had in fact lost formal powers by the 1940s[12]
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