Exercise 2: Why Gorbachev's Reform Institution Became Yeltsin's Opponent — Possible Solution
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This exercise asks you to explain the real reason the same institution
could serve opposite political purposes at two different points in time,
rather than treating this as a simple contradiction.

WHAT THE CONGRESS OF PEOPLE'S DEPUTIES WAS ACTUALLY BUILT TO DO
Gorbachev created the Congress in 1988 for a specific real purpose:
giving him a source of state authority independent of the conservative
Party officials who controlled the Party hierarchy and were resisting
his own perestroika and glasnost reforms. The Congress was elected
through real, contested elections, and its own legitimacy came directly
from that democratic process rather than from Party appointment.

WHY ITS PURPOSE, NOT ITS STRUCTURE, IS WHAT CHANGED
The Congress's own real institutional design - an elected legislature
with genuine independent authority separate from the executive - never
changed between 1988 and 1993. What changed was who occupied the
executive position it was meant to check, and what that executive was
now trying to do. Gorbachev used the Congress against Party conservatives
resisting reform; by 1993, the Congress itself, now populated by many
deputies skeptical of Yeltsin's own shock-therapy program and its
documented real human cost, became the body resisting a different
executive's own reform agenda.

WHY THIS IS A STRUCTURAL FEATURE, NOT AN IRONY TO EXPLAIN AWAY
Any genuinely independent legislature, by design, can end up opposing
whichever executive currently holds power - that is precisely what
"independent" means. The Congress's real function was never to support
reform as such; it was to exercise elected authority independent of
whoever controlled the executive. In 1988 that independence happened to
serve Gorbachev's reforms; by 1993, real economic hardship and disputes
over further reform had turned that same independent authority against
Yeltsin instead.

ANSWER: The Congress became Yeltsin's opponent not because the
institution changed, but because its real, structural independence from
the executive - the exact feature Gorbachev had built it to have - meant
it was never guaranteed to support reform in general, only to exercise
genuine elected authority separate from whoever held presidential power;
once real economic hardship under shock therapy turned deputies against
Yeltsin's own program, that same independence worked against him instead
of for him.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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It identifies that the Congress's real structural feature (executive
independence) stayed constant while its political alignment changed,
rather than treating the reversal as an unexplained irony.