Haakon Lie

After first attending Møllergata elementary school and later Ila elementary school, he graduated from Secondary school in 1925 and in 1927, after giving up university studies, (having attended the State School of Forestry in Kongsberg) and a brief stint as an industrial worker, he became a forester. He was happy with this occupation, but after a bout of tuberculosis in 1927, had to give it up as well,[3] and started working as secretary for the party. In 1931 he was made leader of Arbeidernes Opplysningsforbund (AOF, Workers' Information Society), an institution recently created to promote education in the working class.[3] Lie has cited the AOF as the proudest achievement of his career.[6]

In the early 1930s he made journeys to both Germany and Russia. His experience with authoritarian states – both fascist and communist – helped reinforce his political outlook of a democracy/dictatorship dichotomy rather than a simple right/left one.[8] During the Spanish Civil War in 1936–39, he helped organise aid to those fighting the fascists and, during the winter of 1936–37, he visited the country.[8] At one point the former pacifist Lie also took flying lessons to actively participate in the conflict, but this plan was never carried out.[9]

When Norway was invaded by Germany in April 1940, Lie immediately started organising resistance, taking charge of free radio broadcasts from various locations in the country. For two months this work kept him in constant movement around Norway, and on 7 June 1940, when King Haakon VII and the government left the country for London, he was in Vadsø, replacing a broken transmitter.[8] At this point further broadcasts became impossible, and Lie had to make his way south, through Finland and Sweden, to Oslo.[6] Here he became involved in the underground labour movement, mainly through printing newspapers and spreading information.[8]

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the occupying authority in Norway started cracking down harder on opposition. A strike over milk rations in September led to the arrest and execution of the two labour leaders Viggo Hansteen and Rolf Wickstrøm.[8] This was followed by several high-profile arrests – among them Einar Gerhardsen – and Lie had to flee the country. He left his house only hours before the Germans appeared to arrest him.[8] From Sweden he made his way to the United Kingdom, where he worked as a propaganda secretary for the exiled Norwegian labour movement in London. He made two visits to the United States to gather support and financial aid, the first time he went from New York City to Seattle where he held a series of lectures and radio-interviews before he travelled through Canada from the west- to the east coast.[10] The second trip was as a labour attaché with diplomatic status.[8][11] While Haakon was in exile, his brother Per, who was also a labour activist, was arrested in Norway in 1942.[8] He was imprisoned and eventually sent to Dachau, where he died from typhoid fever in March 1945.[8][12]

Lie had been personally shaken by the post-war Soviet suppression of the social-democratic parties in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. He viewed Yugoslavia leader Josip Broz Tito as the "Martin Luther of communism" after Tito had openly defied the Soviet Union by chiselling out the Third Way. When the Soviets initiated a blockade of Yugoslavia following the Tito–Stalin split, Lie organized humanitarian aid-shipments from Norway. Another concern was that the Pro-Moscow Norwegian Communist Party (NKP) had was gaining support among leftist voters, with opinion polls showing an increase to 15.4%. As he put it :"It was voting based upon the myth of the Soviet Union as the land of peace and socialism - a myth which had to be broken down". It was during this period that Lie, with support from the trade union center set up significant and wide-ranging surveillance of Norwegian communists, (a practice later deemed illegal by a government committee, the Lund commission).[15]

Lie himself defended his hard-line tactics, claiming communism had represented a threat to democracy as well as the party, famously exclaiming "The Labour Party is no damn Sunday school! (Norwegian: Arbeiderpartiet er faen ingen søndagsskole!)". There were also external events that aided his cause. The Marshall Plan accepted in 1947 and the Norwegian membership in NATO from 1949 drew the nation closer to the United States. Meanwhile, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 demonstrated the threat represented by the Soviet Union.[14] Yet Lie was stronger in his support of the United States, and more fierce in his anti-communism, than most within the Labour party.

In 1961, a left-wing splinter group who was previously centred around the party newspaper "Orientering" decided to break off and form a new party known as Socialist People's Party (SF). They were later to deny the Labour Party a majority in the 1961 elections as well as to bring down the third cabinet Gerhardsen as a result of the Kings Bay Affair.[14]

Meanwhile, the relationship between Lie and Gerhardsen grew cooler. Gerhardsen was becoming far more amenable to the Soviets in part due to the influence of his wife, Werna, who was highly sympathetic to the Soviet Union (some even claiming she was a KGB informant).[14][16][17] Gerhardsen had grown more and more frustrated at Lie's hard-line tactics against communists and perceived Soviet sympathisers, as well as his attempts to stifle foreign policy debate within the Central Committee. Lie on his part grew embittered over what he perceived was the Gerhardsen-couple protecting key leftists, such as Trygve Bull. According to Bull, Lie and Gerhardsen hardly spoke to each other after 1957.

At the national party convention of 1967 Gerhardsen openly attacked Lie, to which Lie reportedly responded by threatening to "break" Gerhardsen "like a louse" ("Jeg skal knekke deg som en lus").[18] Gerhardsen later regretted the attack, and later sent Lie a letter of apology - to which the latter never replied. Lie resigned as party secretary in 1969, and Gerhardsen retired from active politics the same year.[11][19] It was not until 1985, at the behest of former defence minister Jens Christian Hauge, that the pair officially reconciled.