When they were an imperial power, they were extremely rock-headed about a lot of things. They were overconfident and cocky, which gave them fragile egos. Russia exploited this to humiliate them and make them lose all self-confidence, and they haven't recovered their balls ever since. They lost faith in all those old warrior traditions, because the people who had been pitching that shit for centuries were made to look like fools in the blink of an eye.