The overwhelming majority of the Russian nobility, men as well as women, who stayed in the USSR or immigrated to France after the 1917 revolution were forced by circumstances to carry out a reconversion strategy. The accounts collected through in-depth interviews or in private archives depict the chaotic nature of the trajectories of adaptation. Using a sociological approach, we analyzed biographical interviews with the descendants born in the 1910s of noble families and tried to follow the practical logic that guided the efforts and personal investments of these former nobles, focusing essentially on their representations of time and on the use of different human resources in the 1920s and 1930s. To understand the changes undergone by nobility during the Soviet period, we have to go back to the genesis of the transformations of the Russian upper strata since the 1880s. In the USSR, the former nobles not only adapted to the Soviet society, but they contributed to the formation of the social structure of the USSR, particularly to the formation of the "old intelligentsia" that consisted mostly of the descendants of the pre-Revolutionary educated classes. In France, the Russian identity gradually became more important than the noble one, although the pre-revolutionary hierarchy and social statuses did not disappear entirely in the emigration.