Theocharis Grigoriadis is a Visiting Associate Professor of Economics and East European Studies at the Free University of Berlin. He was born in 1980 in Serres, next to one of the borders of the Cold War. He studied Law in Athens, but it never convinced him. For that reason, he embarked on a world trip to find out how transition economies work. He studied Economics, Political Science and Russian History at Yale, Berkeley, Moscow and St. Petersburg. He complemented his various study programs with internships in the World Bank Moscow Office, the EU Delegation to Russia and the World Economic Forum. His fieldwork sites included Lipetsk, Krasnodar, Sochi, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Netanya and Nazareth. He is currently pursuing his third PhD in Russian Literature at Humboldt University of Berlin, while doing research for his Habilitation in Economics at the same university. His research interests include transition economics and comparative economic systems, political economy, economic history of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, and foreign aid effectiveness. He had never thought that he would use models of economic transitions from the 1990s to analyze the Greek economy in the 2010s. In his free time, he enjoys the Weimar-Soviet aesthetics of his neighborhood in the (former) East Berlin.