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So here are... a ton of sources, of varying use. This essentially is my bibliography from my MA dissertation on the evolution of the Russian Mafia, 1980-2000 (except this is a misnomer, there is no Russian Mafia. There's a complex underworld of interlinked Eurasian criminal individuals and organisations. Many of whom are ethnically Russian, but many of whom are not. Some are ethnically Russian but have different, or multiple, citizenships.)

Obviously there's more of a lean towards post-Communist Russia, though many of these sources do discuss pre-Communist Russia. For pre-Communist Russia, the best sources are probably:

Russian Organised Crime: A Brief History” in Russian Organised Crime: The New Threat? (London: Frank Cass, 1997)

Arkady Vaksberg The Soviet Mafia (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1991)

Stephen Handelman Comrade Criminal (London: Penguin, 1994)

Joseph D. Serio and Vyacheslev Razinkin “Thieves Professing the Code: the Traditional Role of Vory v Zakone in Russia's Criminal World and Adaptations to a New Social Reality”, in Russian and Post-Soviet Organised Crime (2002)

Basically, you want to be looking at three things: the vory v zakone, corruption in the nomenklatura, especially in the Brezhnev era, and the "fixers" who helped factories get around the USSR's bureaucratised supply chains.

You might also want to look at https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/ , which is the blog of Mark Galeotti, probably the most well-informed western academic expert on the Russian underworld (past and present).

Of course, I'm assuming you don't speak Russian, so these are mostly English-language sources.

Here's a ton of sources, but how much access you'll have to them I don't know: