The monarchy was damaged goods in Russia by the outbreak of war in 1914. The Romanovs had weathered military defeat and the outbreak of revolution in 1905, but only barely. The Stolypin ministry had managed to claw back the Duma's newfound checks over the monarchy through questionable legal means and the Interior Ministry had squashed revolutionary groups through state and paramilitary violence. The cost of the post-1905 stabilization was that a number of potential allies for the Romanovs diminished considerably. The liberal Kadets increasingly tended to view the supremacy of the Duma as paramount and saw in the Stolypin era the dangers of too much monarchical authority. Great Russian nationalist activists and other conservatives likewise saw the very fact that the Tsar needed a Duma was a sign of weakness. Much of the Russian left was already alienated from the monarchy and the 1905 counterrevolution cemented the idea that revolutionaries should never give up an advantage once the revolution had started. The "constitutional autocracy" set up by the post-1905 system was not only contradictory in nature, but it forced Nicholas II to rely more on rule through ministers and other servitors. Some thick-skinned ministers like Stolypin could stomach this, but others in the Russian imperial bureaucracy began to resent Nicholas II's interference into their turf.

The war took these existing tensions and magnified them into major political faultlines between the monarchy and the political sphere. There was a brief moment of a Burgfrieden in which a strata of Russian politics united in the face of the outbreak of the war; Kadets and other Duma representatives voted for war credits and even some of the Marxist Mensheviks saw the war as both a defensive one as well as an event that would propel socioeconomic development to revolution. But such a domestic peace was short-lived and there were sizable factions opposed to the war. Nicholas II did not help matters by trying to assume supreme command. The Tsar's interference grated on military professionals in the general staff and further eroded the relationship between the autocracy and its major remaining pillar of strength: the military. But more importantly, it was the perception of Nicholas II's incompetence and failures that fatally damaged the monarchy. Duma representatives increasingly began to argue that autocracy was the reason for the flagging war effort and the inability of Russia to translate her vast resources into military might. The increased Germanophobia not only made the German-born Empress a target, but fueled all sorts of speculation that Germans within the imperial bureaucracy were a fifth-column. Gossip of Rasputin and his impact in the court further eroded the image of the monarchy, even though the monk was one of the few outspoken critics of the war in the imperial court. Further abroad, both the Anglo-French as well as the prospective American allies saw Nicholas II and autocracy as a barrier to the war. Like a number of Duma deputies, there was a common opinion among some Entente leaders that Nicholas II and his court underlay the the failure of the Russian war effort to materialize into a steamroller that would crush the Central Powers.

This lack of Allied support for the monarchy was one of many factors that underlay Nicholas II's exposed position going into 1917. Those Duma factions that still supported the recognized that Nicholas II was a millstone around their necks and that the a new monarchy under the tsar's brother was just more of the same. Entente support for the fledgling Provisional Government would not be forthcoming if the February Revolution did not change much of anything politically. More immediately, the Duma also recognized that the Petrograd soviets were decidedly anti-monarchist in sentiment. Supporting a neo-Romanov monarchy was a dead letter among the soviets and to push this policy would have further radicalized the soviets. Most tellingly, the refusal of the army's leadership to support the state in a counter-revolution in Petrograd was the key moment before Nicholas II's abdication. The army leaders recognized that the monarchy was a spent force and protecting Nicholas II was not worth the risk to the larger war effort. This was an epochal shift in Romanov civil-military relations as the army had been one of the chief foundations for autocracy.

One of the more interesting facets of Nicholas II's abdication was how much of a non-event it was at the time. Most of the military's leadership portrayed the abdication to their troops as a necessary measure to win the war. The Duma likewise saw little need to try and create a new monarchical system and began preparations for elections to a constituent assembly. Some monarchists hoped that this body would revive the monarchy and offer the imperial title to Grand Duke Michael, but this was a pipe dream. The abdication was part of a larger political process in which more radical politics began to bubble up in Russia, leaving even moderate liberals like the Kadets in much the same position as Nicholas II. The unpopularity of the war as well as severe economic dislocation and hardships ruined any party that argued that Russia's best future course was to continue the war and win it. Much like Nicholas II's autocracy, the Provisional Government was a prisoner of events and could not transcend them.