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Reminds me of a joke Graeber knows from his mother (written down in the book Debt):

There was a small town located along the frontier between Russia and Poland; no one was ever quite sure to which it belonged. One day an official treaty was signed and not long after, surveyors arrived to draw a border. Some villagers approached them where they had set up their equipment on a nearby hill.

“So where are we, Russia or Poland?”

“According to our calculations, your village now begins exactly thirty-seven meters into Poland.”

The villagers immediately began dancing for joy.

“Why?” the surveyors asked. “What difference does it make?”

“Don’t you know what this means?” they replied. “It means we’ll never have to endure another one of those terrible Russian winters!”

I feel the urge to clearify that this is from before nation states and it's the Czar Empire and the imaginary town is most certainly in modern day Ukraine.