RT Article T1 The Resilience of the Russian mafia: an Empirical Study JF The British journal of criminology VO 61 IS 1 SP 143 OP 166 A1 Varese, Federico 1965- A2 Lonsky, Jakub A2 Podvysotskiy, Yuriy LA English YR 2021 UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1745885854 AB 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. K1 Criminal organizations K1 Mafias K1 Russian mafia K1 Soviet Union K1 Rituals K1 Vory v zakone K1 Vory fraternity K1 Diebe im Gesetz DO 10.1093/bjc/azaa053