I don't blame Alexandra that much, just as I don't blame Marie Antoinette for the French Revolution. I think by the time Alexandra showed up the Russian monarchy was doomed anyway by their own ineptitude and unwillingness to change generations before. Just like the French monarchy was doomed long before Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette by constant warfare and overspending. Louis and Marie couldn't have saved the French monarchy and Alexandra and Nicholas couldn't have saved the Russian monarchy. Though I do think Louis and Marie had a better chance of not letting the French Revolution devolve into the terror and they totally bungled that. As much as people would like to imagine that revolutions happen quickly, in the space of a few months or years, when you go back and look you can see the warning signs are there for decades.
Did Alexandra and Nicky help hasten the end of the Russian monarchy? Yes, almost certainly. Did their actions cause it? Not really.
I have to admit, I find a lot of the ways people think Alexandra could have staved off the revolution to be frankly silly. Do people really think the proletariat would have cared if Alexandra got on and was social with the Russian high aristocracy? Absolutely not. The communists didn't just kill Nicholas, Alexandra and their children, they killed off the aristocracy. Being friendly with the aristocracy wouldn't have amounted up to a hill of beans to the communists. The whole system was something they wanted to destroy. Or do people think the White Army would have come faster if they had liked Alex? As if they let 5 innocent children die because they didn't like one woman. This revolution, unlike others in history, didn't come from the aristocracy/gentry so suggesting Alexandra getting on with them would have somehow had any effect whatsoever on the revolution starting or not is foolish.
There's also a lot of talk about how the Russian people would have been fine with the sole heir having hemophilia. They'd have understood. I don't buy that at all. If it wasn't such a big deal that the heir could die at any moment because there was loads of Romanov men running around then it wouldn't have been a big deal if Alex had never had a son at all and it was a BIG DEAL. I think Nicholas and Alexandra knew exactly how the public would react and that's why they kept their mouths shut. And let's not forget they were supported in this decision by their family. I have NEVER read where anyone suggested they tell the public. The ENTIRE family seemed to think keep Alexei's condition secret was the best decision. Let's not assume we know more about how people would have reacted than the people living in that time and in that place.
The other thing I read a lot of is people talking about how they needed to get out there amongst their people more. This is a very modern concept of monarchy created by George V during WWI when he was scared he would loose his throne. He told his family they needed to get out there and be seen by the common people, be involved with them (you can thank him for the fact that George VI and the Queen Mum would go around bombing sites in WWII or the fact that royals are so hands on today)
George V – The King Who Made The Modern Monarchy – Royal Central. Before that it wasn't something that was really done. You're not going to find stories of King Edward VII going down to local hospital to see how people are, hold their hands and hearing their stories (I love Queen Mary's quote of “We are the royal family – and we love hospitals” when a princess complained about going to yet another hospital). Empress Victoria of Germany was not ladling out soup at a soup kitchen. Prince Albert was not down visiting slums to see how to improve housing for the poor. Yes, they might sew clothes for people, raise money for the needy, might be patrons of societies, put together the Grand Exhibition but what Alexandra and her daughters were doing by being nurses was actually pretty extraordinary if unappreciated by any but those who they helped. In a way I think they were doing what George V was but they just weren't marketing it well.
So we need to stop judging these people with 20th/21st century eyes and stop coming up with 20th/21st century solutions to their problems. Solutions that would have never occurred to them. We might as well say they should have given Alexei clotting solution to take care of his hemophilia.
The reality is Russia was stymied in the past not just Nicholas and Alexandra but the entire upper class. To avoid the Russian revolution you needed to start 3 generations before, with the generation that saw the year of the 1848 revolutions. That's when the Russian monarchy/aristocracy should have looked around, saw all the revolutions rocking Europe and said "crap if we don't want this to happen to us we'd better change some stuff. We'd better free our serfs, put in the Duma, become a constitutional monarchy and move with the times." Instead Nicholas I's reign (1825-1855) is all about war, repression, economic stagnation and corruption. Heck Alexander I probably should have done it before 1825 when he saw the revolutions in the United States, France, Haiti and South America. They chose not to, instead the Russian monarchy/aristocracy chose to cling to their absolutest, agrarian ways (even the Industrial Revolution mostly passed Russia by) and ignore what was happening around them while Russian citizens went out and saw how very much the world was changing and brought that information back to the mother land. Nicholas could have been the strongest monarch alive but I think the die was well and truly cast by his father, his grandfather and his great grandfather. Maybe Nicholas and Alexandra could have staved the revolution off for a little while but that's all it would have been, a little while. Because the communists didn't want a constitutional monarchy, these weren't "children of the July Revolution", these were "children of the barricades", of 1848, when we went from liberal revolutions to socialists revolutions. They wanted to pull down and utterly destroy the monarchy and the aristocracy and that resentment and anger had been building for generations, since before they blew up Alexander II. To think two people could hold that back is to massively misunderstand what was going on in Europe at the time.
What I blame Nicholas and Alexandra for is for not seeing the writing on the wall and getting out or at least sending their kids away. If they wanted to stay and die or think they could somehow save the monarchy fine, but they should have sent their kids out of the country. To keep their girls and Alexei there was terribly selfish in my opinion. I'm sure they could have found a way to smuggle those children to their grandmother or other relatives early on. For that, there is no one to blame but Nicholas and Alexandra, who let their children down 150%.