ABSTRACT Soviet legal culture and legal institutions are largely 'terra incognita' for historians and jurists alike. Since access to Soviet legal materials and courtroom documents was extremely limited throughout the Soviet period, it had been impossible to conduct a first-hand study of this arena before 1991. Drawing on newly available archival documents from central Soviet institutions, my work explores the role of Soviet legal scholars, lawyers and judges in shaping Soviet social and political norms and practices. Contrary to arguments that law had little meaning in the USSR, I claim that Stalin's successors assigned legal institutions a central role in building the first communist society. Without questioning the importance of the Party and Political Police my dissertation ascribes historical agency to Soviet legal officials who were marginalized in the history of the Soviet Union. My work further determines that Soviet law and judicial institutions assisted in upholding the post-Stalinist regime. Khrushchev's rejection of terror along with the invocation of 'Socialist Legality' as a central state doctrine altered the relations between law, state and individual in the Soviet Union. Brezhnev, who succeeded Khrushchev in 1964, accepted the new balance of powers between the State and its citizens, and continued using law as a tool for bringing order to a society of 'developed socialism'. Hence, despite Khrushchev's revolutionary zeal and Brezhnev's stagnation, the thirty years between Stalin's death in 1953, and Gorbachev's advent to power in 1985, were years of a long process of de-totalitarization that eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Relying on materials from the USSR Ministry of Justice, the USSR Supreme Court, the Soviet General Attorney's Office (Procuratura), and Soviet Bar Associations, as well as law- school books and memoirs, my work sheds new light on the way Soviet officials saw the system they were part of. Taken together, those materials enable me to point to the boundaries and limits of socialist legal discourse and ultimately answer the question whether there was indeed something uniquely Soviet about the Soviet legal system. It is my goal in the dissertation to revive legal history as a useful and relevant tool in the study of Soviet society, just as it is to the history of Western societies.