I'm afraid that the answer here is "it depends." The Soviet Union tended to approach crime from a sociologically-defined perspective in which criminal acts reflected larger problems within a social organization. This added a potential gloss to criminal acts as they were transgressions against the alleged Soviet utopia. So an incident of petty crime like theft could get enfolded into a larger concerns like youth hooliganism if the perpetrator was young. This often meant much harsher penalties and jail sentences because the accused's acts could be interpreted in the courts as against the social order.

One of the imperatives for someone accused of a petty crime like theft was to try and individualize and particularize the criminal act. This made it essential for defendants to argue that their case was a lichnoe delo (private matter) and not obshchestvennoe delo (a matter of public concern). Therefore it was crucial for a defendant to establish his motive clearly before the court. This made a good lawyer essential for a defendant. For ordinary criminal cases (i.e. not higher level treason or crimes involving national security), a Soviet citizen had a right to a public defender, although they could not consult with their clients until after the state had ended its investigation. The Soviet state capped the fees defense attorneys could charge, so good lawyers operated with a series of under the table payments. If a defendant or their family lacked resources, then their potential pool of defense attorneys shrink.

One of the legacies of Stalinist police methods is that it also imparted a degree of hostility towards habitual offenders. The Soviet legal system held it as orthodoxy that every criminal (save traitors against the state) was capable of reform by the state. Even though this was legally enshrined, the flip side of the coin is that if one is a repeat offender, than one did not accept the helping hand of the state and thus deserves greater punishment. One Moscow lawyer during the Thaw was censured for pushing this line too publicly by saying "there are pathological people that are completely unreformable and such people should be given the most severe punishments." However, this attitude was common among Soviet law enforcement.

Finally, one other variable would be what was stolen and where. Stealing state-owned property was a more serious crime in many respects than the theft of individual property. Theft of state property could have added the ambiguous moniker of "anti-social behavior" to the charge. An example of an extreme case in which this jurisprudence could be applied was in Alma-Ata where two men got a ten day jail sentence for picking roadside flowers for their girlfriends (theft coupled with vandalism made this innocuous act anti-social).

Thus even though the post-Stalin era of the Thaw tried to enact a more liberalized legal system, Soviet justice could be arbitrary and capricious.

Sources

Eaton, Katherine Bliss. Daily Life in the Soviet Union. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2004.

LaPierre, Brian. Hooligans in Khrushchev's Russia: Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance During the Thaw. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012.