“We are not pardoning them, we are asking their pardon”

“We are not pardoning them, we are asking their pardon” is Alexander Yakovlev’s concise distinction between forgiving victims and acknowledging responsibility toward them. In the account of the Soviet reckoning with repression, the phrase makes rehabilitation an admission by those who had remained silent, not a gesture of mercy from those in power.

Source and Setting

Yakovlev, Mikhail Gorbachev’s principal adviser, explained on television that a decree rehabilitating everyone persecuted since 1917 should not be understood as clemency, as some Party members described it. He called it repentance: “We are not pardoning them, we are asking their pardon.” He then made the implication explicit, identifying those who had kept silent and looked away as accomplices to the crimes.

The statement belonged to a rapid public reassessment of Soviet history. Previously banned books were appearing openly, and the Memorial Society was trying to name victims who had not only been killed but erased from memory. In that setting, rehabilitation did more than restore the standing of the persecuted: it challenged the moral standing of those who had allowed their persecution to go unacknowledged.

Meaning and Moral Direction

The sentence reverses the expected direction of pardon. The victims are not asked to receive forgiveness from the state; the people and institutions implicated in the silence ask the victims for pardon. Its first-person plural makes that responsibility collective, while the accompanying explanation prevents the phrase from remaining a ceremonial formula: the relevant failure was to look away while crimes were committed.

That reversal matters because the book describes a public language newly able to name the scale and character of repression. Memorial’s initial hesitation to use the word “millions” gave way to a sense that people had been waiting for permission to say it aloud. Yakovlev’s words belong to the same change: historical rehabilitation becomes an ethical reckoning with both the violence and the enforced silence surrounding it.

Later Contests over Legitimacy and Memory

The phrase’s emphasis on accountability provides a contrast to later political arguments in the book, where rival groups compete to claim democratic legitimacy and speak for the country. During the confrontation around the White House, Eduard argues to General Rutskoy that a parliament resisting Yeltsin is defending democracy, and that Western governments will have to accept this claim in the name of their own values. This is a tactical argument about who may legitimately rule; Yakovlev’s formulation instead asks who bears responsibility for crimes and for failing to oppose them.

The struggle over historical language continues in other forms. In Zakhar Prilepin’s account of the National Bolsheviks, a teacher warns that talk of the fatherland, imperial greatness, and a sacred cause can lead toward trouble. Later, the Communist Party gains support from people angered by democracy’s economic injustice, while Vladimir Putin appeals to memories of Soviet childhood and argues against treating communism as equivalent to Nazism. These positions do not repeat Yakovlev’s phrase, but they show how the past remains a contested political resource: it can be approached through acknowledgment of complicity, through national and revolutionary claims, or through attachment to remembered Soviet life.

Narrative Significance

Yakovlev’s words mark a moment when official speech turns against the customary language of absolution. The decree does not simply declare the victims innocent; in Yakovlev’s account, it also confronts the moral condition of those who survived by keeping silent. Set amid public efforts to name the dead and discuss repression openly, the phrase gives historical rehabilitation a reciprocal structure: recognition of the victims entails judgment of the society that failed them.