This is the Massie's entire premise. If there had been no hemophilia, there would have been no Rasputin and thus no Lenin. So, it isn't so far out -- I certainly agree it's a valid position. But Kerensky's quote has always bothered me. I always thought he said this to get himself off the hook for his own foolish mistakes -- and he's blaming *Alexandra* by implication (he doesn't mention hemophilia) for everything.
I think it's impossible to ascribe the revolution to any one cause and even difficult to assign order of impact among the many causes.
I think that by the start of 1917, the Romanov monarchy was hanging by a single strand of a once-strong rope. That rope lost a strand or two when, after a whiff of hope for liberalization under Alexander II, the monarchy reverted to a more reactionary stance under Alexander III. But I think the unravelling began in earnest when Nicholas ascended the throne ill-prepared by both temperament and training for what lay ahead.
Several strands let go with his "senseless dreams" speech upon his accession and its reinforcement a decade later in his speech opening the Duma. Further strands broke as he began to isolate himself from the senior nobility. That seemingly minor loss of fiber had a disproportionate impact when the frustrated senior nobility (as well as the extended Romanov clan) became amplifiers for reports and rumors into the larger body politic about Alexandra's problematic traits.
Critical strands broke when Nicholas proved incapable of finding and hanging onto strong ministers and resisting the importunities of his wife and others to appoint toadies.
And Alexandra, whether or not haunted by the specter of hemophilia (which I think
does offer previously underestimated clues to her psyche), contributed to many of the problems that plagued her. While Alexei's hemophilia occasioned the role Rasputin was to play, I don't think that means Alexandra might have otherwise avoided having her crediblity compromised. Remember that the Mssr. Phillipe mess was spawned by her resorting to a psychic for help in having a son, not for help in dealing with hemophilia. She had a propensity for mysticism and a lack of judgment in whom she trusted that would have shown up under any circumstances in which her conduct was put on display.
World War I put huge additional strains on the monarchy, but I am not among those that think a strong rope could not have held Russia together as a monarchy under those trying circumstances -- if for no other reason than a strong monarch would have had competent ministers who might have avoided Russia's involvement in the first place or managed her affairs better once she was in the war.
In my view, Raspution only had the power to cut that final strand that held the monarchy above the abyss. The problem was that that's all that remained to be cut by the time the scissors were put into his hands. The entire depressing circus of the final months -- in which increasingly laughable ministers came and went, in which Nicholas went into hiding at Stavka to avoid the intractable problems in his capital and home, in which a Romanov and a Yussopov resorted to murder and were publicly hailed for it, in which everyone just gave up and waited for the end -- was the culmination of the progressive breakdown of a rope plagued by a core weakness in the fiber: Nicholas himself.
