Hi, that's a pretty cool question!

Legal system of the Soviet Union

The Soviet legal system is typically classified within Civil Law, and often as it’s own subset of Soviet law or a part of Socialist Law. I speak more about the origins of this system here.

Said shortly, while the Bolsheviks were sceptical of law initially, socialist rhetoric was pretty quickly used to justify establishing necessary legal systems, one that would be quite familiar in substance to a bourgeois lawyer. In general, most of what i say in this comment will be not be accurate for the whole soviet period, mostly the post-WW2 system.

Before I talk about the lawyers I do have to talk a bit about the system and what soviet justice is (you ask about that as well), especially the courts.

There were several systems of courts or dispute resolution. While the Soviet Union didn’t have corporate or commercial law in the way we think of it, they did have disputes between enterprises or other state organisations within the state planning of production, and had to set up dispute-resolution mechanisms to resolve these.

That was primarily done through arbitration, in state arbitration (gosarbritrazh) and departmental arbitration (vedomstvenny arbitrazh), depending on whether the parties belong to the same ministry or not. There was also geographical divisions within the arbitration. These served the function of commercial courts. Their goal was for the parties to find an agreement, but the arbiter could decide the case if one was not found. The procedure was conducted according to the civil code and parties used in-house jurists, later also lawyers, for their arguments, so it was very much a legal proceeding.

A problem with this type of arbitration was what an arbitration conclusion really could do. The problem for state enterprises were often just bottlenecks in production (i.e. problems with the central planning). Receiving monetary damages from winning arbitration didn’t resolve that, so contacting someone to try and get the bottleneck fixed or cooperate to just avoid arbitration could sometimes be better. A good example of the limitations of arbitration and soviet commercial law is this case:

Two organizations, a bread factory and a food base, were located next to each other. The base stored flour for shipment to the bread factory. Under the terms of the contract, the bread factory was required to return the flour sacks to the base. The two adjoining organizations were separated only by a wall and linked to each other by a conveyor belt, but this only worked one way and didn't allow for sending the sacks back, and the factory had no truck to drive them back, something the ministry had refused. Thus the factory kept failing it's obligations to deliver the sacks.

The factory was forced to pay enormous fines to the base, totally frustrating its effort to meet its financial plan. Every quarter the arbitrator was forced to impose fines ranging from 28,000 to 37,000 roubles; for that sum the factory could have purchased two or three trucks. But the ministry refused to grant the factory permission to buy a truck, and fines were continuously imposed

There also existed general civil courts for ordinary disputes, here people would take their housing disputes or illegal firings and your ordinary stuff. It was supposedly widely used, but the types of tort or contract cases we are used to would be more rare. A difference in soviet civil law was that public interests were emphasised even more than in other civil law countries (already a difference between some civil and common law countries), even in disputes between private parties.

Malone describes the process of a citizen seeking legal help like this:

A citizen needing legal advice visits the legal collective of his choice regardless of its location. Usually, he will go to the collective in the area of the city in which he resides. He may ask for any lawyer on the staff who may be personally known or recommended to him. Otherwise, his case is assigned to one of the lawyers on duty

And of course there was a system of criminal cases, also pretty recognisable after some initial experiments. The focus was on the objective evidence for the elements of the crime and intent or moral guilt. However as the system was civil law, judges were inquisitorial and the goal was to find the truth, not the adversarial anglo-american system where judges are more neutral arbiters. Judges thus had wide discretion over the procedure and substance of a case. Not a problem in itself, but it can make interference easier.

The Procuracy (prosecutors, but they also had a supervisory role like ombudsmen) was another very important legal institution in the soviet system. They obviously oversaw investigations and prosecuted criminal cases, but also had some supervisory and other powers over civil cases and the right to supervise how ministries, enterprises and others upheld the law, giving the procuracy pretty wide and extensive powers. The procurators also exercised quite large influence (formal and informal) on courts proceedings and outcomes, so should not be confused with just a “party” to a case like the prosecution in other countries would typically be. Rates of acquittal in the later soviet union were very low, and the power of the prosecution is probably part of why that is.

So there was a court system and judicial institutions not too unfamiliar from the west. However, the Soviet Union did not have judicial independence, all branches were under the communist party. Interference in individual cases was quite common if the case was of some importance.

Continued below