Historically, whenever the Russian state has triumphed in wars, the ruling elite has interpreted the victory as a validation of tyranny. The domestic population, rather than being rewarded for their sacrifices, are forced into deeper subjugation. Here are some examples.
Peter I's victory over Sweden in the Great Northern War is celebrated in Russian imperial mythos as the moment Russia "opened a window to Europe." In reality it closed the door to basic human rights.
Victory allowed Peter to centralize power to an unprecedented degree. He dismantled the traditional, centuries-old autonomy of the Ukrainian Cossack Hetmanate, which had been guaranteed under previous treaties.
Domestically, the victorious state-building was funded by the brutal exploitation of the peasantry. Peter replaced the Boyar Duma with a puppet Senate and established 12 rigid administrative Collegies to control every facet of public life. He subjected the Orthodox Church to state control through the Holy Synod and instituted the "soul tax" (podushna podat), a move that legally and economically locked the peasantry into systemic serfdom.
This reactionary logic was starkly evident during the reign of Catherine II. Her decisive victories in the Russo-Turkish Wars (especially the war of 1768–1774) successfully pushed the imperial borders to the Black Sea, securing the annexation of Crimea and vast southern territories. For the Russian state, this was a golden age of expansion; for Ukrainians, it was an unmitigated disaster.
As long as the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Khanate posed a potent external threat, the tsarist regime tolerated the military autonomy of the Ukrainian Cossacks. However, immediately after the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774) eliminated this threat, the Cossack frontier became obsolete in the eyes of the center. In June 1775, returning Russian forces surrounded and brutally demolished the Zaporozhian Sich. This foreign triumph directly enabled Catherine's 1783 imperial decree, which annexed Crimea, dismantled the remnants of Ukrainian autonomy, and officially institutionalized brutal, state-sanctioned serfdom across Left-Bank and Southern Ukraine.
A similar tragedy unfolded following the defeat of Napoleon in the Patriotic War of 1812. Emperor Alexander I had spent the early years of his reign flirting with enlightenment ideals, introducing modest educational reforms, and quietly drafting plans for a constitution and the gradual abolition of serfdom. Yet, the triumph over Napoleon and the Russian army's march into Paris completely warped the tsar's political trajectory. Basking in his self-proclaimed role as the savior of European monarchism, Alexander interpreted victory as divine confirmation of autocratic infallibility.
Rather than rewarding his subjects with the promised reforms, the tsar retreated into deep domestic reaction. He institutionalized the notorious "military settlements" (Arakcheevshchina), forcing soldiers and peasants into a state of hyper-regulated, militarized slavery. On the global stage, Russia abandoned all liberal pretenses to lead the "Holy Alliance" (Sviashchennyi soiuz), a reactionary, anti-liberal coalition of European monarchs designed to militarily suppress any spark of constitutionalism or democratic reform across the continent.
The Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War II is perhaps the most tragic example of this dynamic. The war was won at an unimaginable human cost, with millions of Ukrainian and Soviet citizens sacrificing life or health. Stalin used the victory to proclaim the absolute superiority of the Soviet socialist system over all other forms of governance. Rather than rewarding the victors, the regime immediately began "tightening the screws"
(zakruchuvannya hayok). The victory became a tool to crush any remaining intellectual or political autonomy.
Between 1944 and 1953, the Soviet security apparatus sentenced approximately 87,000 people to death or long-term imprisonment
for participating in or supporting the Ukrainian independence movement (OUN/UPA).
Millions of returning Soviet prisoners of war, who had seen the reality of life outside the Soviet borders, were branded as traitors and shipped directly to the Siberian labor camps.
The Red Army did not bring liberation to Eastern Europe; it swapped the "brown plague" of Nazism for the "red plague" of Stalinism, institutionalizing state terror across the Eastern Bloc.
This historical pendulum has brought the modern Russian Federation to its current war against Ukraine. A temporary "thaw" as a brief period of liberalization to let off steam would not work as the federal structure became unmanageable. Otherwise it would threaten the territorial integrity of the Russian state.
The scale of the war has forced European capitals and NATO to recognize Russia as a persistent, long-term threat to Euro-Atlantic security, prompting active military preparation along the eastern flank, the modernization of the strategic Suwalki Corridor, and defensive rearmament across the Baltic states.
The Russian political system remains organized around a single autocrat (whether styled as an imperial tsar, a Soviet general secretary, or a modern president) who rules solely.
Both political power and economic wealth are entirely dependent on how close an individual is to the ruling autocrat, preventing the development of independent institutions or a genuine market economy.
The central question facing Russia is not whether the current system can survive militarily, but whether it can indefinitely maintain extreme centralization, political repression, and mobilization without the economic and social foundations necessary to sustain them. Russia’s war in Ukraine shows that it can not.
This does not mean history is deterministic. But the pattern is difficult to ignore: throughout Russian history, defeat has often forced rulers to negotiate with society, while victory has convinced them they need not.
