Ioulia Shukan is a lecturer at the University of Rennes and earned her Ph.D. in 2006 from the Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris. She will be at Harvard for four months (September–December 2007) studying the topic “Political Crisis and Biography: Trajectories of Former Communist Officials in Ukraine and Belarus in the Early 1990s.” As a contribution to the sociology of regime change in the former USSR, Shukan’s research proposes to address the change through the logic of elite continuity, the mechanisms of reconversion of resources, and of personal adaptation to the new political context. Based on oral life stories (collected mainly between 2000 and 2004 through biographical interviews), her work shows that the idea of continuity of the former communists in politics is valid for only some segments of these elites and that behind the continuity there was discontinuity in their career pathways