While labor camps (eg Solovki) do predate the Communist era, their scale was massively expanded by the Soviets -- we're talking of scaling up from thousands of

While labor camps (eg Solovki) do predate the Communist era, their scale was massively expanded by the Soviets -- we're talking of scaling up from thousands of people to millions. Solzhenitsyn explores this in detail in the Gulag Archipelago. That said, for much of the Imperial period, crimes were punished not by banishment, but through mutilation (gouging eyes, cutting off tongues and hands, etc) and execution.