At least with SVN, the is one option that is pretty similar to git’s filter-branch: svndumpfilter. You dump the entire history of the SVN repo to a file, edit it, and then load it into a new SVN repo. I used this technique to pre-process a repo to remove large files before migrating to Git. The file format is simple enough that you can easily write a program to edit the stream.

It’s very easy in CVS, which is why some people prefer CVS to any distributed solution.