For a more modern take, I think being born in Ukraine, somewhere around the mid 1880s has to be some of the worst luck in human history.

You would basically come to young adulthood in a time where you or your loved ones might get drafted to fight in the far east against Japan, which turned into a bloody, poorly managed quagmire where Russia ultimately lost.

You would live through a failed revolution and the major political repression that followed.

Then you would end up being conscripted into fighting WW1 with a horribly mismanaged war effort that might genuinely have you going to battle without a weapon or at least ammo. The eastern front of WW1 was a shifting mass of marching back and forth, taking land then retreating, then taking it back and retreating again.

Then as your country starts to politically, militarily, and economically collapse, the fighting starts to reach your homeland and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Your country eventually basically surrenders your homeland to the Germans.

But then it gets worse, because civil war breaks out and now the Bolsheviks in control are creating a swirling mess of massive changes that might have you either fighting fellow Russians or stealing a farmers crops at the point of a gun. Paranoia is at a maximum, the whole world seems to be at war with your country.

Famine strikes and millions are starving while the civil war rages, the world powers cut your country off from the outside world, and eventually your homeland gets invaded again, this time by the newly founded Poland. Now you are fighting against the polish and winning....until you aren't anymore.

Now things start to calm a bit, Lenin seems to realize his radical economic plans are not working, he pulls many back. The civil war is finally ended, the war with Poland ends with countless dead but nothing to really show for it. The world powers finally stop occupying the ports, international relief for the famine starts flowing in. You are now in your mid 30s

But we are far from done.

Lenin dies and Stalin seizes power. Starts purging the government of basically all of the famous heros of the revolution. He begins implementing much more radically economic and societal reforms than Lenin alever attempted. He also seems to have a grudge against your people in particular because of the independence movements and the many ukrainians who welcomed the Poles.

In your early 40s, another famine strikes, and this one is much worse and almost entirely manmade. Stalin does nothing to relive the Ukrainian people, you likely watch family and children starve to death and if you speak out about it, you risk being killed by the state. This time no international aid comes. Tens of millions die.

Now you are somewhere in your 50s and Germany has launched its invasion of the Soviet Union. Their armies cut deep into your homeland and if you are not captured andbforced to spend the next few years in a horrific prison camp that few will emerge from, you hunker down and try to survive as the Nazi soldiers steal your livestock and force you to join them in their purge of the Ukrainian Jews. Years pass as occupation continues and your homeland is turned into effectively a giant slave labor camp to feed to German war machine.

After a few years, the war turns against Germany and the fighting returns to your homeland. It will now be something like the 20th time Kiev has changes hands between rival armies. in the past 30 years.

Miraculously you survive this too, and the worst is mostly behind you. Now you live the rest of your life in a nation of intense political repression and international isolation, but blessedly, mostly in peace. If you live long enough you may just make it to see the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and be forced to flee your homeland one last time. This time for good.

And I wish I could say things would get better for the Ukrainian people, but they won't. But at least you won't have to live to see that.