Initially a Social Democrat and then a Trotskyist, Larsen came to support Stalinism, and defended the Soviet Union's policies during the early and middle parts of his career.

Through his political and union work he learned about syndicalism and the growing opposition to the Social Democratic Party in the labour movement.

The courses were in German, English, Russian or French so the student the party was to send to Moscow had to have good language skills.

During that time, Joseph Stalin's purges of Leon Trotsky and the left opposition in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) were at their height.

Larsen was prompted for a repudiation of his previous views after Stalin's victory at the 1927 party congress and the subsequent banishment of Trotsky to Alma Ata, but it was only after severe pressure that he complied.

The internal disagreements were only worsened by the Comintern's decision in the start of 1930 to send a German representative of its Executive Committee to Denmark to reconcile the factions of the party.

Larsen had an ability to translate the strange and alien decrees of the Comintern to Danish conditions, and his oratorical skills contributed greatly to the successes in organising the unemployed and gaining seats in parliament.

Larsen wanted to develop a Danish variant of communism and these sentiments grew after the seventh Comintern congress had adopted the popular front strategy aiming for a close cooperation with the Social Democrats.

While he did not want to make the Social Democrats the main enemy, their unsympathetic views towards the communists made Larsen doubt that cooperation was possible.

With the exception of Arne Munch-Petersen, who had become the Danish representative of the Executive Committee of Comintern after losing his seat in parliament in 1935, the party leadership supported this course.

Even though they affected many of his former friends from his International Lenin School stay in the 1920s, and even though he did not believe in all the accusations, he defended the Great Purge and the Moscow trials.

Although he defended the Danish party line he was pressured into signing a declaration that the DKP would follow the popular front strategy.

He was not allowed to leave Moscow before he convinced the Comintern that he had to go home to look after his wife who was sick with cancer and to tend to his work in parliament.

In March 1938 following Adolf Hitler's takeover of Austria in the Anschluss, Larsen held a speech in which he used a more patriotic rhetoric than before and warned that Denmark could suffer the same fate.

In a letter to the Social Democratic leader and prime minister Thorvald Stauning, Larsen promised "the most unconditional and loyal support".

This put him under a great deal of stress and in September he asked the party secretariat and later the Comintern for permission to resign as chairman.

He and the party continued its political work as part of the resistance movement, with an illegal publication against the ban on communism and an open letter to prime minister Thorvald Stauning on 20 August 1941.

Aksel Larsen survived the concentration camp and was saved by Sweden in April 1945 by count Folke Bernadotte's White Buses.

The friendly relations between Social Democrats and communists that had existed right after the liberation soon disappeared and the old fronts from before the war started to re-emerge.

His loyalty to Moscow was strong, and he gained a reputation for being "one of Scandinavia's most reliable and trusted Stalinists" after he helped to purge Norwegian communist leader Peder Furubotn.

The first traces of doubt came shortly after Stalin's death when all defendants of the Doctors' Plot trials were rehabilitated because their confessions had been made under torture.

The collective bargaining negotiations of 1956 and a general strike had strengthened the DKP, and Larsen got his party's support to pursue a more independent line.

Internal tension grew and resulted in an extraordinary party congress in January 1957 where Aksel Larsen for the first time since 1932 delivered his annual report in his own name and not in the name of the central committee.

"[2] In the 2005 book Firmaets største bedrift historian Peer Henrik Hansen argues that Aksel Larsen was recruited by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Over eight years, Larsen conducted several meetings with the CIA where he gave information on the relationship between the Soviet Union and communist parties in other countries.

He denied direct knowledge about this, but told the agent that the party had turned down Soviet and East German requests for aid with espionage.

Ideas for a new political party was made public on 20 November 1958, and a preparatory committee with Larsen as its leader was created the day after.

Leading up to the 1960 election, the Gallup polls were not favourable to the Socialist People's Party, but Larsen showed his command of the then-new medium of television, when he spoke to the viewers from a hospital bed after breaking his leg in a traffic collision.

The Red Cabinet lasted until December 1967, when six of the 20 Socialist People's Party members voted against the Krag government's proposal to freeze a threshold payment.

Although he had gained acceptance with his new party, and although his supporters revered him and spoke about a special kind of socialism called "Larsenism", he was also accused of having betrayed his principles.