Exercise 1: Why Khodorkovsky's Prosecution Is a Meaningfully Different Case — Possible Solution
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This exercise asks you to identify the specific real distinction between
Khodorkovsky's case and the other two, rather than lumping all three
together as simply "the state acting against a critic."

WHAT THE ORIGINAL BARGAIN ACTUALLY WAS
Putin's own early bargain with Russia's 1990s-era oligarchs was
specifically transactional: keep the wealth you accumulated, in exchange
for staying out of politics. This was not a blanket demand for silence
or loyalty - it was a narrow, real condition tied to one specific
behavior, political funding and activity, that oligarchs were free to
avoid.

WHY KHODORKOVSKY'S CASE FITS THAT BARGAIN SPECIFICALLY
Khodorkovsky was not targeted for being wealthy, nor for general public
criticism of the system. He was targeted after he broke the specific
term of that bargain - funding opposition parties in the Duma and
supporting independent media. His prosecution can therefore be read as
enforcement of a real, pre-existing transactional condition he had
personally agreed to and then violated.

WHY NEMTSOV AND NAVALNY DON'T FIT THE SAME FRAME
Nemtsov was a former government official turned public critic - he had
never been part of the oligarch bargain at all, since his position came
from public political activity rather than 1990s-era wealth requiring
Kremlin tolerance. Navalny's case is different again - his own influence
came from popular anti-corruption investigations reaching a mass
audience, a genuinely different kind of threat (public legitimacy and
popular support) than an oligarch's private political funding. Neither
case involves enforcing a specific bargain either man had personally
struck with the state.

ANSWER: Khodorkovsky's prosecution is meaningfully different because it
enforces a specific, pre-existing transactional bargain - wealth in
exchange for staying out of politics - that Khodorkovsky himself had
implicitly accepted and then broke, while Nemtsov's assassination and
Navalny's imprisonment involve no comparable bargain at all, targeting
instead a former official's public criticism and a popular anti-
corruption investigator's mass following respectively - different real
threats met with different real responses, not one uniform pattern of
"the state acting against critics."

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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It identifies the specific real mechanism behind Khodorkovsky's case (a
broken transactional bargain) and explains why that mechanism doesn't
apply to the other two cases, rather than treating all three as
interchangeable examples of state action against critics.