This question is hard to answer because tanks are just one component of a war effort and are often tailored for their country's particular needs, armor has been pretty classified stuff for decades, and there hasn't been much massed armored warfare since WWII.
However, I'd still say that overall, the answer would be "Yes."
In the West, the value of tanks has constantly been questioned, with each new anti-tank weapon raising fears that the tank was becoming obsolete. Russia, as a whole, seems to have always had greater faith in them, probably due to being a land power with land enemies in open terrain, and it shows. Many new major breakthroughs in tank design since the 1940s have come from Russia. They may not have invented sloped armor, but the T-34 was arguably the first mass-produced tank designed around sloped armor that was meant to repel anti-tank fire. Russia pioneered mass-produced autoloaders, and composite armor, and active protection systems (APS). Its tanks have consistently had firepower and armor out of proportion to their small and more easily transported size compared to Western tanks. Granted, that armor, small profile, high firepower, and low weight are achieved by sacrificing ergonomics and gun depression, but Russian doctrine works around these flaws because of their generally physically smaller crews and their offensive strategy that doesn't need as much gun depression.
When the IS-3 came out, for example, it outgunned anything the West had, and had exceptionally good frontal armor, all with an astonishingly low profile and weight. Unlike the King Tiger, it was mass-produced, with plenty of fuel for its units. This was at the cost of a very low rate of fire, and I don't know about any other of its sacrifices, but overall the West would have had a hard time defeating it with mere Shermans and early Centurions in the mid- to late-'40s.
The T-54, as mentioned, also greatly outdid the West. While Britain and the US steadily tweaked the Centurion and Patton designs, the Soviets had finally almost perfected the promising T-44 design with a new vehicle able to shoot through the armor of the M47s, M48s, and Centurions while shrugging off their fire - and it was light, compact, affordable, and mass-produced! From the mid-'50s until the early '60s the West was outmatched. The L7 105mm gun allowed the M60 and improved Centurion marks to defeat it, and the indifferent T-62 design succeeded but never replaced the T-55 (a product-improved T-54).
But again, Russia arguably shot past the West with the innovative T-64A. Sure, the early T-64 had teething issues and never became the dominant Russian tank, but the T-64A improved the firepower and other items, and started an unbroken tradition of Russian tanks with autoloaders. The T-72 took that and made a roughly comparable but more affordable design, and in the T-72A, a production tank with composite armor was introduced.
The West suddenly caught up starting in 1979 with the new Abrams and Leopard 2. Russia got the excellent T-72B, and the Abrams and Leopard were upgraded and joined by the Challenger, and so on, and so forth.
It must be noted that the often-referenced massacre of T-72 variants in Iraq by the Coalition in 1990-91 was incredibly lopsided for a great number of reasons. The T-72 models used were awful. Their leadership was awful. Their ammunition was awful. Their crews were awful. They were massacred and demoralized from the air before being wiped out on the ground. But this isn't the fault of the basic T-72 design at all. Warsaw Pact forces with a comparable number of T-72Bs would have done far better, and we've all seen what happened to Iraqi and Saudi Abrams tanks when fighting ISIS and the Houthis. Good designs in bad hands fail. Bad designs in bad hands fail horrifically.
And now we have the T-14. It's too early to say whether it's a good or great design, but overall I'm impressed with the Armata concept. It takes most major advancements in tank design over the last few decades and incorporates them from the start rather than as add-ons, and it does this at a manageable weight and in a mostly common hull for an MBT, an HIFV, an SPH, and an ARV. One of the biggest issues with existing MBT families is that they've mostly pretty much hit their growth potential. The originally 60-ton Abrams and Leopard 2 designs have grown massively with age and upgrades and between their suspensions and transport infrastructure, more weight is not really an option. The overall disappointing and overrated Challenger 2 is even heavier, and it's barely been upgraded in comparison. Russia has pushed the T-72 and T-80 designs almost as far as it can; there's no real room for them to improve passive armor any further, and since the Burlak turret for the T-90M was rejected, they won't be getting the longest rod penetrators (yes, yes, snicker) that they could, or hard-kill APSs, most likely. There haven't been any great breakthroughs in armor design in decades, and again, more weight isn't an option, so if you want to improve protection, you have to have an APS, an innovative rearrangement of the layout, or both.
So the Russians did both. The T-14 is designed from the very beginning to use a soft-kill as well as a hard-kill APS, plus advanced ERA, plus a new layout. Putting the crew in an armored capsule in the hull and leaving the unmanned turret less well-armored should allow a good increase in armor without a major weight increase. This layered defense also makes it really hard for most ATGMs and even KE rounds to defeat the T-14, at least in theory and from the front. The T-14 has plenty of room for growth, both because it's new and because it's such a big boi. Big enough to fit longer KE rounds in the vertical autoloader, which should increase armor penetration. The T-15 looks great for inserting infantry into heavily contested spaces, too.
Of course, this design didn't come from nowhere - decades of Russian prototypes, especially in the 1990s, paved the way, and the American TTB (Tank Test Bed) had a similarly unmanned turret. And the unmanned turret would prevent the crew from observing the surroundings from out of the turret hatches, which will probably handicap situational awareness. It has 360-degree camera coverage, which I'm sure will only improve in quality with time if developed, but this driving around entirely enclosed and relying on cameras is something very new and will require some work and getting used to. Some American tankers interviewed on it said that was a serious problem, but frankly, without new armor materials, unmanned turrets are the only way to improve passive armor without letting the weight get out of hand.
