Dr. Jakub Lonsky (University of Edinburgh) will present his study on March 6, 2025

The speaker will present his research titled “Gulags, Crime, and Elite Violence: Origins and Consequences of the Russian Mafia” as a part of the Warsaw Economic Seminars meetings.

The seminar will be held on March 6, 2025 at 17:00 in Room A203 at the Faculty of Economic Sciences. There will also be an option to attend remotely, via the Zoom platform.

Link to the meeting: https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/j/93278126659?pwd=HAlBLR5bz9uqFroMDWLPnPF02vgqWi.1

[Meeting ID: 932 7812 6659
Passcode: 014067]

Below we present an abstract of the presentation.

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This paper studies the origins and consequences of the Russian mafia (vory-v-zakone). Using a unique web scraped dataset containing detailed biographies of more than 5,000 mafia leaders, I first show that the Russian mafia originated in the Soviet Gulag, and could be found near the camps' initial locations throughout the 1990s Russia. Then, using an instrumental variable approach that exploits the proximity of the Russian mafia to the camps, I show that Russian communities with mafia presence in the 1990s experienced a dramatic rise in crime driven by elite violence which erupted shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The surge in violence was indiscriminate and driven by ethnic conflict, not only with rival organized crime groups – mainly the Chechen clans – but also within the organization itself.