The Soviet state developed different mechanism of controlling its citizens. Trials and quasi-judicial procedures were one of them. Not only professional judges in official courts and military tribunals, but also Communist Party organizations and lay people at schools, universities and work places took part in evaluating, judging and policing their peers. Propaganda, side by side with literature and theatre turned law into a tool for both education and suppression. The course explores the use of these mechanisms throughout the Soviet period, from the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries in the early 1920s, to Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s and to the Dissident Movement of Brezhnev’s times. Using archival documents, legal materials, as well as memoirs and literature we will trace the role legal mechanisms played in molding the “new Soviet man.”