To say that neither one of them was qualified for the job is to put is as mildly as possible. Of course Marie and the Court did not make her feel welcome but Alexandra lacked imho the maturity to deal with her responsibilities. I always thought Rasputin was brought into the mix to help with Alexei. Erickson's was the first book I read that makes mention of the butcher the French authorities were looking for, the fraud who insinuated himself into their circle and held seances with both the Tsar and Alix. Apparently both of them believed that holy man as well.
Does not. It portrays Alexandra as a woman with many insecurities who became aloof and haughty after her engagement to Nicholas. Even Queen Victoria mentioned that she had changed.
Marie was a beautiful vivacious social butterfly but inmho she raised two sons who ended up being henpecked by their wives. The disaster for Nicholas was that he was the Tsar, ill prepared for the job he never wanted or saw himself fit for, with a wife who had scores to settle from the Romanov family to anyone she saw as a threat to Nicholas's God given rights.
OK, I know I'm letting myself in for it, but here goes anyway:
While I might agree that Nicholas and Alexandra were not the right people for the Russian Imperial Throne at the time Nicholas succeeded, my sympathies are still in their favor.
Nicholas was denied the proper education for a Tsesarevich by his father, Alexander III, and between his father and Pobedonostsev, his only schooling was in a highly conservative political thought process. He was never offered the opportunity to learn more liberal ideas of ruling. During his first years as Tsar, he was bullied unmercifully by his uncles into making some terrible decisions, such as the one to attend the French Coronation Ball, which he and Alexandra did NOT want to do in light of the Khodynka catastrophe. Better to have "offended" the French, and earned the respect of their subjects by withdrawing from that ball, praying and visiting the wounded, and seeing to the burial of the dead.
Alexandra came from a small German court, and stepped onto the throne immediately she was married, following on the heels of the death of her father-in-law. She was paralysingly shy, which was interpreted as aloofness, rather than recognized for what it was. She had a decidedly Victorian upbringing, both at her mother's skirts, and then at her grandmother's, and was ignorant of the profligate ways of the Russian court. Of
course she frowned at the extreme decolletage, the flirtatiousness, and the not-too-discrete affairs of the Russian aristocracy! The pressure to bear an heir was laid squarely at her feet (never mind that it was Nicholas' genetic contribution that mandated the sex of the child, not hers) and she bore four daughters in a row. When the heir finally appeared, he unfortunately had inherited Victoria's flawed gene, leaving her guilt-ridden and fearful for the remainder of her life.
For those of you whose hindsight is 20/20, what might you have done differently in her place, and why?