Right on Vizio!
The reason so many Russians abandoned democracy as a solution was b/c Nick II kept pulling the rug out from under the Duma every time he felt like it.
I'm being your standard pollyana American, but if the Kadets were able to get and keep decent government from 1905 on involving Stolypin and making serious land reforms people thought worthwhile....it's possible
that a Russian middle class could grow and become politically engaged.
AIUI, Russia's intelligentsia pretty much thought the Tsarist system beyond redemption in the 1880's on, it just a matter of which revolutionary philosophy- Anarchism, Socialism, or democratic republicanism was in favor at any particular moment.
Russia didn't need near the convulsive horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution and Stalin to industrialize or be a world power.
To address the OP, Nick II had to understand he needed to step out of the way, let the people elect whomever they wanted, and work with those ministers to do the heavy lifting.
Most European monarchs were doing so but look at Prussia/Germany and how their parliament did so much to change Germany but failed to restrain Wilhelm II from embroiling them in the meatgrinder of WWI on his personal guarantee to A-H.
However Nick II was an autarch out of the High Middle Ages who was taught since birth he was God's Appointed Maximum leader of All the Russias.
You wouldn't tell Henry VIII he had to work with Parliament.
It took the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution in 1688 that brought the Windsors to Britain that they really became a constitutional monarchy in practice as well as theory.
Russia was a Byzantine remnant caught in the Industrial Revolution and found itself as much at sea as the Ottomans and Austrians they opposed.
WWI showed how relying on an autarch could completely fail a nation.
The Germans, Austrians, Ottomans, and Russians all found themselves
ruined by secretly-drafted personal guarantees that weren't in their nations' best interests.
The British and French Entente was a strange duck brought about by the UK not wanting Germany to be continental hegemon or opposing their dominance of the waves and therefore global commerce.
IMO it was making the best of a busted hand in the face of WIlhelm II wanting a badass navy and therefore Germany's place in the sun (in the running for choice slices of Africa and Asia).
LSS- the more you spread out education, technical proficiency, and decision-making, the less a rotten apple like Nick II influenced by Rasputin can spoil the barrel.
Getting the Russian Empire to that point where a capable,confident bourgeoisie was in charge and able to make a constitutional monarchy work was something seen as generations away.
The Soviets managed to get their nomenklatura together in two generations that'd make them a global power both by fiat of the general Secretary and consensus throughout the Party of cultivating whatever talented folks to the best they could be to serve the State.
Could Stolypin and other K-D reformers have done that if WWI hadn't occurred? Possibly.