For as much Cold War history as I was taught in high school, I still don't have a clear picture of what life and business were like in the Soviet Union. I'm taking a comparative politics course at my uni, and we recently learned about modern Russia so, naturally, the Soviet era was discussed. My professor said that all businesses in the USSR were state-owned, and I wondered how this applied to law. Was one able to hire a private lawyer in the Soviet Union, or did prosecutors and defense attorneys alike work for the state?
I have gone into detail on the Soviet legal system in these two questions:
I have just been accused of a crime in the post-Stalin USSR. What is going to happen?
I have just been sent to prison in the Soviet Union. What should I expect?
This is more of a side note to your question, but saying that all businesses in the Soviet Union were state owned isn't exactly true and depends on what time period you're thinking of.
Lenin's New Economic Policy was implented in 1921 towards the end of the Russian Civil War and it allowed for private businesses. Forced collectivization wasn't working out particularly well and there was a real possibility of farmers rising up against the new Communist government. Lenin still believed it important to have control of "the commanding heights", i.e. banking, transport, large-scale industry, and foreign trade, but allowed a secondary capitalist kind of economy for everything else with the intention of more gradually implementing collectivization.
A quote from page 125 of Russia in the Twentieth Century by M. K. Dziewanowski (6th Ed.) regarding Russia's economy in 1922:
While private business accounted for 88.5% of the total enterprises, it employed only 12.4% of the industrial labor force. On the other hand, State-controlled companies employed 84.1% of the nonagricultural labor force.
The NEP had a whole host of problems for a bunch of reasons and Stalin does away with it in 1928, but for that time period at least there was a secondary market economy in Russia. Of course that's only one very specific pre-WW2 and pre-Stalin example but I'm pretty sure that there are other examples of the USSR sort of dabbling in market later on. Can't really remember anything off hand so take that with a grain of salt.