As an instrument of state policy, it must surely rank as one of the most ineffective, indeed counter-productive, in history.
The Romanov tsars sent generations of dissidents, revolutionaries and liberals to Siberia, and look what happened to their regime. Stalin used the same technique more brutally and kept Soviet dictatorship in place for decades, but in the end the Gulag generations did for communism too.
Now the prime minister, Vladimir Putin, has reaffirmed the Russian predilection for exiling dissident enemies to the wintry wastes beyond the Urals. The verdicts and sentences handed out to Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, the former owners of the Yukos oil giant, bear all the hallmarks of tsarist and Soviet repression: politically directed verdicts on spurious charges, savage prison terms and the long journey east.
But before we get carried away with the historical analogy, it is worth pointing out a few obvious differences.
First, Mr Putin (unlike the tsars but like Stalin) has the overwhelming support of ordinary Russian people. The oligarchs who made millions out of the first Russian privatisation disaster in the 1990s are still universally hated in the country as thieves and gangsters who stole citizens' rights to the country's huge resources.
Second, Mr Khodorkovsky may have been dubiously tried and convicted, but he is not a Gulag dissident in the mould of the Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His supporters, who have a well-organised and well-connected international lobby at their service, like to portray him as an innocent martyr for freedom and a victim of repression. But his track record in business and politics argues against that benign view.
I met Mr Khodorkovsky a couple of times in the early 2000s. The first occasion was in London in late 2001, at a sumptuous event held to mark the launch of his Open Russia Foundation, a philanthropic organisation aiming to promote Russian relations with the West. The guest list was impressive ("all Rothschilds and Rolexes", I wrote at the time), and Mr Khodorkovsky was in his element, glad-handing with British and American worthies all eager to do business with the "new" Russia.
He symbolised the country's new business ethos in all its diversity.
Immensely wealthy (he was by far the richest Russian then) and with genuinely progressive policies for the country's huge but primitive industrial assets, he was also tainted by the manner in which he, and the other oligarchs, had acquired control of those assets: a mixture of sharp dealing and intimidation that even Mr Khodorkovsky himself admitted had made him a "robber baron" during the disastrous first post-Soviet privatisation.
The London event, and similar ones in Washington and Moscow, were the beginnings of a campaign to clean up his murky image, and perhaps it was a genuine move towards more ethical standards of corporate governance. The Economist magazine at the time commented that Mr Khodorkovsky was the first Russian oligarch "to see there was even more money to be made by going straight".
The second time we met was in Moscow in early 2003, by which time Mr Putin had turned irreversibly against him. Mr Khodorkovsky had funded political opponents to the (then) president, and via his control of the vast resources of Yukos had behaved almost like a rival political power in Russia, doing deals with China and the US without Mr Putin's authorisation.
He was very different that day at a small press briefing in the grey Moscow headquarters of Yukos, much more diffident than at the London event. His bank, Menatap, had already been raided, and he must have known Yukos would be next. A few months later, he was arrested, tried and convicted for the first time, for tax evasion on the sale of Yukos oil.
He would have completed the prison sentence for those "offences" in 2013, but then came the second batch of charges. Now he will be free just in time to see Russia host the FIFA World Cup in 2018.
Why does the fate of a self-confessed "robber baron" who chanced his arm in politics and fell foul of an authoritarian Russian leader matter to the West or the Middle East?
At the moment, Russia is embarking on a second great privatisation programme, with some US$30 billion (Dh110.18bn) of state-owned assets, from railways to energy, for sale. You can assume that the big western investing institutions, as well as the huge sovereign wealth funds of the Middle East, will want a slice of that action.
There have already been doubts among western investors that the Russians are serious about the sale. Some say there will be no transparency, that the stakes on offer are too small and that Russian bureaucrats will conspire to retain control. Nothing has really changed in the country, they say, and the fate of Mr Khodorkovsky is just another item of evidence.
But the Russians wouldn't dare to treat foreigners the same way, would they? Unfortunately, the experience of a host of foreign investors, from Renaissance Capital to BP to IKEA, suggests otherwise. All these international corporations have been at the receiving end of corruption, bureaucracy or downright extortion in their business dealings in the country.
The situation is unlikely to improve while Mr Putin continues to send businessmen to Siberia.