This shows that the Russian domestic legitimacy is entirely compensatory. It compensates for systemic failure, poverty, and technological backwardness at home with the projection of imperialism abroad.
When that projection of it shatters, the regime is forced to make concessions to its own population to survive. Conversely, military triumph vindicates the worst excesses of the ruler, transforming battlefield victories into domestic terror.
In the first part we focus on military defeats that boostered liberalization periods.
The reign of Nicholas I was thirty years of a militarized police state to repel the reformist winds of Europe. It stemmed from the Decembrist revolt of 1825 (an attempt by progressive military officers to establish constitutional governance). This model, which historians have contrasted with the early, reform-minded years of Alexander I, successfully suppressed domestic dissent but ultimately ran aground in Crimea during the Crimean War (1853–1856). The defeat by the allied European powers laid bare the backwardness of the empire.
This war was fought using the Ukrainian population. Up to 50% of the imperial land forces and nearly 70% of the Black Sea Fleet were of Ukrainian origin. In 1855, the "Kyiv Cossackdom" uprising erupted against the nobility and the state.
To prevent a total collapse of the social order, Alexander II was forced to initiate the "Great Reforms".
In 1861 the serfdom was abolished. The reform was deeply flawed as it left peasantry economically tied to noble estates. But the shock of the Crimean defeat granted universities self-governing autonomy and established elected municipal dumas that gave citizens a voice in local governance.
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The state officially abandoned its monopoly on secondary education in 1857, leading to the creation of female gymnasiums in 1858, Sunday schools in the 1860s, and expanded access to universities for both male and female youth.
These moderate reforms did not satisfy the demands. That resulted in the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, which triggered a reactionary backlash under his successor, Alexander III.
During the 1880s and early 1890s, the state entered an epoch of counter-reforms. While Soviet Marxist-Leninist historiography politicized this reactionary period, viewing Alexander III's policies as a simple destruction of the "conquests" of the 1860s, the primary objective was the aggressive reassertion of autocratic authority.
The next major wave of liberalization was similarly forced by a military defeat. In 1904, the Russian Empire entered into a war with Japan, driven by imperial expansionist ambitions.
The conflict resulted in a signed act of capitulation on January 2, 1905, despite the explicit decision of the council of defense to continue the struggle. The surrender handed over more than 30,000 prisoners, 530 artillery pieces, and 35,000 rifles to the Japanese forces.
The shock of these military failures instantly shattered the domestic legitimacy of the autocracy, igniting the Revolution of 1905.
To appease the progressive circles of society and national movements, the tsar issued the October Manifesto, which established the State Duma (parliament) and granted a brief period of socio-political liberalization. This temporary thaw allowed national groups to openly advocate for their rights for the first time in decades.
World War I (1914–1917) is another example. Reeling from devastating military defeats on the Eastern Front, logistical collapse, and hyperinflation, the tsarist autocracy completely lost its domestic grip. This failure exploded in the February Revolution of 1917, which swept away the Romanov dynasty and transformed autocracy into a temporary liberal regime.
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With the abdication of Nicholas II, power passed to the liberal Provisional Government (Tymchasovyi uriad). This new administration abolished the death penalty, lifted state censorship, declared absolute equality before the law, and initiated preparations for the democratic elections of a Constituent Assembly (Ustanovchi zbory).
Under these liberalizing conditions, the central government even approved major regional development and infrastructure investments, such as a 10-million-karbovanets credit to fund the construction of the Podolian Railway in Ukraine. However, the Provisional Government refused to pull out of World War I, choosing instead to honor its imperial "allied obligations" to the Entente.
By attempting to wage a highly unpopular military campaign while simultaneously granting absolute political freedom, the liberal administration undermined its own coercive power, leaving the door wide open for the Bolshevik coup in October 1917.
Decades later, the late-Soviet empire fell into an identical trap. The Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan (1979–1989) became a war of attrition. The defeat in Afghanistan acted as a delayed-action fuse that destroyed the Soviet state in 1991.
The war fostered widespread systemic corruption, severe hazing (didovshchyna), and a profound psychological "Afghan syndrome" that shattered the domestic myth of Soviet military benevolence.
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When combined with the economic shock of disappearing petrodolars, consumer deficits, and the regime's attempts to cover up the Chornobyl catastrophe, the military's loss was fatal. The war's delayed consequence was the complete paralysis of the regime's coercive apparatus, which emboldened national mobilization movements in the Baltic states, the Caucasus, and Ukraine, making the dissolution of the USSR inevitable by 1991.
