I've always thought that Nicholas II would have been a very good constitutional monarch (as his cousin George V was); however, the Russian nobility was completely opposed to it.
In the 19th century western Europe was embracing democracy and had an ever-expanding middle class while Russia was still clinging to medieval feudalism. Russia effectively skipped the Industrial Revolution and eventually they had to pay the price for it.
Russia was rapidly expanding in the decade or two leading to Great War. But the fundamentally flawed autocratic state could not handle the pressure from the Great War.
That’s the irony, according to Marx, the Communist revolution was to take place in the Industrial countries, a country could not become socialist until it had a significant proletarian population in an industrialized country. Russia was nowhere near that point in 1917.