How could the Romanovs have stayed in power?

I guess I'm rather hostile to Nicholas and Alexandra, but their sheer, appalling incompetence brought so much destruction to the world. And it is a case like "if only the Germans would have come as liberators to the USSR in 1941" - as if they would have, they would not have been led by genocidal maniacs in the first place. Nicholas II couldn'ẗ have managed a post office in Archangel, so how could he have managed (as the autocrat) a huge semi-medieval, multinational empire during an unprecedented world war?

edit: a blog post of mine about this particular historical grievance:

http://stockholmslender.blogspot.fi/2013/06/long-live-february-revolution.html
 
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"So the real question is what could have been done to defeat the [February] Revolution earlier? I think we have to go back to February 25, two days before the mutiny. By that time the strike movement had reached its height, but it did not lead to a revolution, and in fact it was clear that the workers could not by themselves overthrow the regime. Shlyapnikov, the leading Bolshevik in the capital, scoffed at the idea that this was the start of a revolution. Just give the workers enough bread, and the movement will peter out, he said; the demonstrators will become tired and go back to work. This in fact had been the pattern of several bread riots in the recent past. The government had actually been on the right track--avoid an open conflict with the crowd, which would just pour fuel on the flames and run the risk of a mutiny among the soldiers of the garrison. Instead, the authorities determined on active suppression on February 26, and this policy, though it briefly seemed successful, led to disaster..." https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/IYhcBYfJZR0/1GzT5p5sgUsJ
 
I guess I'm rather hostile to Nicholas and Alexandra, but their sheer, appalling incompetence brought so much destruction to the world. And it is a case like "if only the Germans would have come as liberators to the USSR in 1941" - as if they would have, they would not have been led by genocidal maniacs in the first place. Nicholas II couldn'ẗ have managed a post office in Archangel, so how could he have managed (as the autocrat) a huge semi-medieval, multinational empire during an unprecedented world war?

edit: a blog post of mine about this particular historical grievance:

http://stockholmslender.blogspot.fi/2013/06/long-live-february-revolution.html

To be fair, it's not like Nicholas II and Alexandra inherited a well-oiled machine and ran it into the ground. They were placed in charge of a massively dysfunctional empire - a mess that was inherited all the way from Peter "the Great" and had been festering and further complicating itself for centuries. Even a genius ruler would have been hard pressed trying to fix that. And while there's no denying their total incompetence, I don't remember anything to suggest they were personally "cruel" and "hateful"?
 
To be fair, it's not like Nicholas II and Alexandra inherited a well-oiled machine and ran it into the ground. They were placed in charge of a massively dysfunctional empire - a mess that was inherited all the way from Peter "the Great" and had been festering and further complicating itself for centuries. Even a genius ruler would have been hard pressed trying to fix that. And while there's no denying their total incompetence, I don't remember anything to suggest they were personally "cruel" and "hateful"?

Well, they did not have the imagination to understand how disastrous and destructive and appallingly costly in terms of human lives their policies were. They didn't see even that. So they didn't think they were cruel and sadistic while leading a great empire rigidly, determinedly towards the unimaginably cruel and sadistic apocalypse. And, yes, they did not have a well functioning apparatus to help them, instead they were shaped by that rotten system and never imagined that there could be anything better. To have a chance as an autocratic ruler you need to be intelligent, imaginative, energetic, flexible, pragmatic and far sighted, a good and decisive judge of people and circumstances. I think that this sort of combination of characteristics would have gone a long way to avoid the vast human holocaust that was Russian history of the first half of the 20th century.
 
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