Abstract

Criminal organizations constantly face challenges that threaten their existence. This paper discusses the effects that state repression and state transformation have on criminal organizations and how such organizations respond. We focus on the case of the Russian mafia, known as the vory-v-zakone. We identify the key challenges faced by the vory throughout Soviet and Russian history and examine how the Russian mafia adapted to such threats. We conclude that the biggest threat came not from state repression during Stalin’s Great Terror but rather from state transformation in the 1990s. We also show that Putin’s era repression of the vory has not been more intense than that of the late Yeltsin’s years. The paper is based on a new and unique data set we constructed, which contains biographical information of more than 5,000 members of the vory fraternity.

中文翻译：

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俄罗斯黑手党的复原力：一项实证研究

摘要

犯罪组织不断面临威胁其生存的挑战。本文讨论了国家镇压和国家转型对犯罪组织的影响以及此类组织如何应对。我们关注的是俄罗斯黑手党的案件，被称为vory-v-zakone。我们确定了苏维埃和俄罗斯历史上战役所面临的主要挑战，并研究了俄罗斯黑手党如何适应这种威胁。我们得出的结论是，最大的威胁不是来自斯大林大恐怖时期的国家镇压，而是来自1990年代的国家转型。我们还表明，普京时代的镇压vory没有比叶利钦晚年更加激烈。该论文基于我们构建的新的独特数据集，其中包含5,000多个兄弟会成员的传记信息。