It has always been difficult to describe properly how the Communist parties of the world have functioned since the creation of the Communist International in 1919 because of the lack of Soviet sources. Comitern and its main guidelines, however, have been known for long. A number of historians believe that the Communist parties sometimes had a certain degree of autonomy with regard to the Soviet leadership a certain room for manoeuvering which actually existed from time to time. But did we have adequate sources and answers as to why such "loopholes" surfaced and why they suddenly disappeared? With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the withering away of Cold War mentalities, it became possible to reconsider these questions and to arrive at new concepts of world Communism. The opening up of the Soviet archives in 1992 provided the empirical preconditions for insights into the real rule of the Communist parties. The great sales success of the comprehensive Black Book of Communism, edited by the French historian Stephane Courtois, surprisingly put the communist phenomenon on the agenda in several European countries as on of the most central public issues. Its success has challenged historians to enter into renewed research in this field, one of the most important phenomena in the 20th century. One key question is whether it is legitimate to compare Communism and National Socialism. The author of this article focuses on the role of leadership as a key to understanding the "criminal" version of Communism that gained the upper hand in the Soviet Union and consequently in the international Communist movement. After studying the Moscow archives the author proposes a new periodisation for the Communist movement, i.e. 1931-1947, the period of the totalitarian rule of Joseph Stalin and his attempt to create "The New Man-Soviet design." These Communist functionaries, educated in the Soviet Union, are perceived as Stalin's tools controlling the Communist movement from within. They were creatures concealing the fact that Stalin alone was the monopolistic ruler in the Communist movement. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its bodies, Comintern and the national communist leaderships, were the puppets of his personal or patrimonial feudal style rule. His channels of power went in two main directions: one through the Secretaries-General of each Communist party/institution-leaders hand-picked by himself. The other was through his various secret services-each watching the other. This secret way of rule and "Art of Deception" of the Communists, making them believe that they were their own masters, was Stalin's main method of keeping the Communists loyal and obedient to the Soviet Union, that is, to himself. The instruments safeguarding Stalin's interests and legitimately controlling the Secretarie-General were the "New Man" in the Communist parties. Glimpses of dissent noticed within the Communist movement after 1931 are explained in different ways, and focus on the international and national political dynamics during the immediate post-war years until 1947. They are partly results of Stalin's loss of personal power during the war and partly due to national sentiment within the Communist parties. This national tendency is also understood as a consequence of the great wave of new Communist recruits entering the Communist parties through the resistance movements during the war. A potential conflict between the pre-war Communist cohort and the war-Communist cohort became latent, since the latter were not educated in the Soviet Union under Soviet surveillance. To illuminate these phenomena, the author exploits his large collection of original sources from the Soviet archives, using the Norwegian Communist Party as a case study. This particular investigation shows that the Norwegian case cannot be analysed at national level alone. The Soviet documents clearly prove that the Norwegian case was seen in a Nordic context. The main task of the Soviets was to keep an eye on and influence the leadership in the party. As a result of his research, the author concludes that new studies of Communism should concentrate on individual actors at leadership level and the leaders' relations to Stalin personally.
