ALTHOUGH THEY WERE REQUIRED TO OBTAIN general law degrees, lawyers in the Soviet Union (called jurists, or yuristy) were more often identified by their separate positions. These included the advocate (advokat), a practising lawyer who represented clients in court and belonged to the bar; the jurisconsult (yuriskonsul't), an in-house counsel for state enterprises; the judge (sud'ya); the procurator (prokuror), who supervised the actions of courts and acted as prosecutor; the investigator (sledovatel'); the judicial official; and the legal scholar. During the Soviet era, the meaning of the term 'professional' was tied to the ways in which jurists were carrying out the state's dictates, rather than seeking to fulfil the ideals of Western professions, such as gaining a monopoly, controlling admissions and training, and improving their socioeconomic status.1 However, advocates, more than any other type of jurist, tried to maintain at least some elements of self-regulation as one Soviet regime and approach to legal reform gave way to the next. Then, beginning in the late 1980s with Gorbachev-era reforms, advocates encountered opportunities for gaining significantly more control over their professional programmes. This article will examine whether, since the late 1980s, advocates have in fact benefited from those opportunities by becoming relatively autonomous from state officials, or whether their relations are still strongly influenced by Soviet-era legacies.2 The approach used here to explain the process of organisational change in the advokatura is historical institutionalism, a neo-institutional approach that focuses on how institutions shape actors' goals and strategies and mediate their relations of cooperation and conflict.3 This approach sheds light on the long-standing constraints imposed by state officials that Russian advocates have continued to work under in the 1990s, and shows why, at the same time, advocates nevertheless have managed to reshape and control aspects of their profession. The author employed diverse methods of research in her study. In 1994-95 and 1997 she collected data from 93 interviews with advocates and over two dozen