Look at one of many examples that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave in The Gulag Archipelago for how the Soviet Union would condemn someone to many years in the Gulag as an “enemy of the people” for the most innocuous of “crimes”:
A tailor laying aside his needle stuck it into a newspaper on the wall so it wouldn’t get lost and happened to stick it in the eye of a portrait of [Lazar M.] Kaganovich [close associate of Stalin and head of the Soviet railroad system]. A customer observed this: Article 58, ten years (terrorism).
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2, p 293