During the Crimean War I understand that the Tsars army was hampered by their limited ability to transfer reinforcements, strangling bureaucracy that stifled flexibility on the part of Russian generals, and technological handicaps with the Russian Army armed more or less the same as it was during the Napoleonic era, with flintlock smoothbore muskets and limited ammunition and encouraging the bayonet over the bullet. Meanwhile British and French forces were using rifles firing Minie balls and were much more able to move troops and supplies around. Despite this the Russians seemed to put up a helluva fight and inflicted some horrendous losses on the Allies. Why? Given the substantial advantages the Allies seemed to have had, why wasn't it more of a sweeping victory for them?
A couple of points:
A lot of the Crimean campaign boiled down to a siege against Sebastopol. This tended to level the playing field for the Russians. A siege takes fewer people to defend, the defenses give an advantage against an attacker's firepower and so on.
The allied armies in the Crimea won pretty well every field battle against the Russians. So in a sense when given the opportunity to use their advantages the allied armies did better.
A lot of the allied loses were to things like disease, resulting from poor supply arrangements, infrastructure and implementation. Borrowing from Wikipedia, of the 21,097 British dead in the war, 16,323 were victims of disease rather than Russian action. The length of the siege contributed to this so some extent I suppose so perhaps this was something of a success for the Russians?
There have been some suggestions that British command of the campaign was flawed but I think this is a matter of dispute. So for example it depends on whether you think the failure to pursue after the Battle of Alma was because of overly cautious/foolish command by the British, or because they were legitimately concerned about preserving their cavalry arm.
The only proper book I've read on this topic is Cecil Woodham Smith's "The Reason Why" which is mostly about the Charge of the Light Brigade, but gives insight into the broader campaign and its flaws.