18 million people were sent to gulags. 1.6 million died.
I doubt they were all "involved in politics" beyond expressing an opinion Stalin didn't allow.
Please, be aware that Solzhenitsin admitted that he lied about millions sent to Gulag on purpose. Documents from archives do not support that numbers.
> Russia's Gulag History Museum says a researcher has discovered a secret Moscow directive in 2014 ordering the destruction of some of the last remaining documents on Soviet-era prisoners -- a move it described as "catastrophic" for historians.
https://www.rferl.org/a/gilag-history-museum-says-moscow-ord...
Every source I've seen says about 18 million, including that one:
> As many as 17 million people were sent to the Gulag, the notorious Soviet prison camp system, in the 1930s and 1940s, and at least 5 million of them were convicted on false testimony.
It is a propaganda machine, not an objective history research institution.
These 18 (and up, sometimes up to 40) millions of people in GULAG (notice all caps) numbers are taken from Solzhenitsin's works, if you go through the chain of sources long enough. And Solzhenitsiin's works are not based on any facts or documents.
I also wonder where does this "at least 5 millions of them were convicted on false testimony" come from? How this interesting and significant number was obtained? Did the resource you cite analyzed every and all records of these 17 (18, sometiimes up to 40) million people?
The educated middle/high class in Moscow was probably quite critic of Stalin's policies and nothing would happen to them as long as they were not loud enough with their criticism.
Even before Stalin, under Lenin (who was not nearly so bad as Stalin) about 100,000 people were executed for being "counter-revolutionaries" during the Red Terror.
It’s pretty clear that in at least a couple periods of Stalinist history, extreme paranoia led him to imprison or otherwise dispose of enemies in great numbers, e.g. 1937 and again with the Doctor’s Plot toward the end of his life. The late 30’s intensification is, after all, know as the Great Purge and not the great worker shortage.
Anne Applebaum’s scholarly account of the gulag is a great read on the subject. I think she would probably agree that the it wasn’t an either/or issue. Labour demands for industrialization were a driver as were Stalin’s own delusions.
It's as bad as privatized incarceration and worse.