Of course they were a small percentage. That just means they imprisoned a lot of people, though. The absolute number of political prisoners was extremely large, in the millions.
There was no rule of law in the USSR. Sentencing was arbitrary. Your typical "thief" was quite often a person who inhabited the apartment someone else wanted, or a person who's position someone wanted at work. Write to the authorities that you saw them stealing: done! There were prison quotes to fill, most seriously. The United States has absolutely nothing on the Soviet Union.
Only a person who has no experience outside the realm of Western existence could believe such a thing as Soviet (or today, Chinese) statistics. People were disappeared, summarily shot in basements, all the time. The whole system worked like that, from prisoners in prisons to the production of basic commodities: https://soviet_intelligence.enacademic.com/381/Uzbek_Cotton_.... Everything was lies and murder.
Western intellectuals spent decades defending and minimizing Soviet atrocities, because like many intellectuals, they really believed Utopia is possible, if only everyone thought like them.
They still do. The admiration for the Chinese Communist Party's response to COVID has been very telling. Note that praise of Taiwan, who handled it phenomenally without welding people into apartment buildings, has been limited in comparison.
Honest question: where do you get the information that you're operating on? It sounds like you're just presenting opinion and you don't know a whole lot about Soviet history, gulags, or the US prison system.
You do know that we have forced labor in the US and slavery is allowed under the 13th amendment if you are convicted of a crime. Prisoners are frequently lent out as cheap labor to private companies.
I would encourage you to look at the Soviet statistics on the Ukrainian famine, and ask yourself if any of them can be trusted, and why you have trusted them in the past.
We're talking about a government that suppressed its own scientists to a point where a critical design flaw in a nuclear reactor was ignored until the world's worst nuclear accident occurred.
And like a good little ideologue, you proceed with whataboutism, assuming that people like me haven't called legislators to demand an end to private prisons and prison labor. I have.
You're setting up straw men and attributing lots of arguments to me that I'm not making. I spent a month in Kyiv last year, went to the Holodomor museum, and just finished a book about it not too long ago. The famine was very much a real thing. I've also been to Chernobyl, but I'm not sure why you're bringing any of this up.
The stats talk about number of people imprisoned in a particular moment of time. It doesn't say if a part of them for example died over the next couple of months due to cold and starvation and were topped up with new inmates That would make the number look unchanged during the next count.
Only a person who has no experience outside the realm of Western existence could believe such a thing as Soviet (or today, Chinese) statistics. People were disappeared, summarily shot in basements, all the time. The whole system worked like that, from prisoners in prisons to the production of basic commodities: https://soviet_intelligence.enacademic.com/381/Uzbek_Cotton_.... Everything was lies and murder.