As a Tsar, Nicholas II did everything he could to maintain an absolute monarchy and quell or reverse any attempt to democratize it. Yet, he had only daughters, who were forbidden to inherit the crown, and a haemophiliac son whose life expectancy at the time was barely expected to reach his twenties. What did Nicholas II expect after his death ? Also, why didn't he try to have another son? His wife was only 32 when Alexis was born.
Interesting thought experiment OP, but I'm afraid you might be disappointed by the answer. The Romanovs had ruled the Russian Empire, and the Moscovy Tsardom before that, for more than 300 years on 6 November, 1917 N.S. but November Revolution doesn't quite have the same ring and the Julian-dating convention, as was in use in Russia at the time, puts its eve on 24 October.
Nikolai II was the twenty-second Romonov-line autocrat (or about the twenty-second, if you want to be picky about what constitutes a ruler of Russia). The Romonovs could trace their history (reliably) back to the fourteenth century, when their earliest ancestor was working for minor Moscovy nobility before a state called 'Russia' even existed, and if they really stretched it, they could push that pedigree back to the ninth century when the Rurikid dynasty (from which the Romanov dynasty was ultimately cleaved) is purported to have to begun in The Russian Primary Chronicle.
In 1917, Nikolai II had exactly zero reasons to believe:
Now of course, just because Nikolai II had no reason to believe something that the rest of the Russian nobility, Bolshevik leadership, and German aristocracy could see quite clearly didn't mean it wouldn't be so, but the point I'm trying to make is your question boxes Nikolai II's thinking into a short-termist framework which it most certainly was not. Or maybe it was so short-termist that it missed the forest for the trees. You can make that decision for yourself.
What was he going to do after he quelled the October Revolution? Probably the same things he had been doing before and during it: continue to resist the democratization of his country. Chain smoke. Play cribbage. Vacation in Crimea. Pillow fight with his son and daughters. Write weird love letters to his wife. He liked hunting-- a lot actually. He is purported to have shot over 1,000 pheasants one trip. He was an amateur photographer^([)^(1)^(]). He liked cycling.
This is a man that the word 'aloof' does not even begin to describe.
Well over 75% of his personal diary from the period concerns his (shockingly) banal private affairs and has nothing to do with the state over which he was the God-ordained autocrat, and was also completely collapsing all around him amid a revolution and a war unlike any others which the people of the era had ever seen before.^([)^(2)^(])
Remember that 1917 wasn't even the first time his subjects had tried to depose him. The late Christopher Hitchens, inveterate semi-ironic Troskyist, described the botched first attempt a decade earlier thus:
The real missed opportunity for Russia is 1905, because if that doesn't work, then it's another decade of tsarism and then a terrifying war which is the wreckage of the whole country.^([)^(3)^(])
But even before that, anarchists had tried to assassinate his father Aleksandr III. They'd succeeded in getting his grandfather Aleksandr II. His great-grandfather Nikolai I had had to put down the Decemberist uprising immediately upon succeeding the throne. Back one more generation and you're at Pavel I: assassinated inside the castle he'd built to protect himself from that fate exactly, by a conspiratorial group which included his wife-- the same fate (including the conspiratorial wife) which befell Pavel I's father, Pyotr III. That wife by the way, Yekaterina II, immediately had to put down a massive peasant insurrection led by a guy who alternatively claimed to be fighting for her deposed husband's honor or to be her deposed husband himself. Back a few more generations and you're at Ivan VI, the infant emperor who lived his life in solitary captivity in a remote prison cell after being deposed by his cousin Elizaveta I. A few more generations back and you're at Pyotr I who watched his favorite uncle thrown from a balcony onto the upturned pikes of the streltsy soldiers in active insurrection below, followed by a lengthy co-tsarship with his also-underage half-brother under the aegis of a woman named Sophia, who inspired this portrait. Ad nauseam. The Romanovs had come to power in the first place after nearly two decades of various Russian noble families successively dethoroning and executing one another-- think, a medieval French Revolution without all the lofty idealism or sweeping rhetoric, but the guillotine turned up to 11. The first Romanov tsar's mother supposedly burst into tears when the Moscovy elites offered the throne to her son-- they had to practically beg him to accept it (or so the story goes).
The point is, there was always someone trying to kill the emperor or overthrow the emperor or intrigue behind the emperor's back or throw bombs at his bullet-proof carriage. Being a Romanov, and what's worse a Romanov emperor, was a dangerous job. Nikolai II was a simple man. It's not that he was utterly ill-suited for the job, he was just middle-suited for it. Unfortunately for him though, he needed to be super-duper-suited for it because he was inheriting an autocracy that had been imploding for the last several generations (and maybe more if you want to have the republic/empire conversation), and the people he was playing against were guys like Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Levs Trotsky and Kamenev, as well as the entire German Imperial Army which was helmed by a crazy Prussian with a complex who had had the audacity to dismiss one of the greatest diplomats who has ever lived right in the middle of the latter throwing an almost 30-year long perfect game in European politics. At a certain point words like 'insurmountable' need to start being thrown around. I'd argue that this is one of those cases.
By Romanov standards, Nikolai II made almost all the right decisions: I fail to see a Romanov leader who does not underestimate the Japanese Navy in 1904. I think only a select few would have backed down during the build up to World War I (and more out of Germanophilia, the sort of which led Pyotr III to stop waging war with the Hohenzollern King in Prussia Frederick II the Great immediately upon the former's succession, rather than any kind of brilliant streak of international relations foresight). Perhaps a more daring leader like Alexei I might have ridden out to meet the protesters on Sunday, 9 January 1905 O.S. as he had done during the Salt Riots of the mid-seventeenth century, but even then-- Alexei I only rode off with his life after allowing the boyar who levied the contentious tax to be bludgeoned to death in the streets. And it seems nigh impossible an equivalent or better outcome would arise against the backdrop of the late imperial period. As I enumerated above, none of the Romanovs were overly shy about bringing arms to bear against their polity-- in the macabre grand scheme of things, Nikolai II had not even been an especially repressive ruler to that point. Bloody Sunday killed about a sixth of the amount of people killed by the Socialist Revolutionaries and their ilk in the same year inside the Romanov government.
As for the succession-- even if Nikolai II had had no sons, instead of just one hemophiliac one, the Romanov line would have (and did in fact) continue beyond him. When Nikolai II abdicated he also did so on behalf of his ill son, thus Mikhail Aleksandrovich inherited the throne (which he refused to accept until a resolution was passed by the government endorsing the decision, showing that absolute delusion with respect to the position of the imperial throne in the eyes of its subjects was not a trait totally unique to Nikolai II). Had the former succeeded though, he would have become Mikhail II-- the irony of fate is highlighted once again when one remembers Mikhail I (born Mikhail Fyodorovich) was the first Romanov Tsar. The would-be Mikhail II was its last.
I appreciate your sentiment that Alexandra was only 32 by the time Alexei was born, but at this point she was only 32 with five children-- one of whom was seriously ill. Alexandra's hyper-focus on Alexei's health is one of the reasons that the notorious Rasputin was able to rise to prominence in the first place as well, showing that she certainly didn't share your optimism that either Alexei was a trivial heir or having another child would be a straightforward endeavor. I'm not an expert on child-bearing, but most medical literature today uses cautionary language when discussing pregnancy over the age of 35-- but three years less, a hundred years ago, coming off a difficult birth to a child who required (or at least received) around the clock attention? That might make trying again a bit of a hangup.
this is a tough question to answer because we can only guess at his intentions. tsarina alexandra was adamant that nicholas needed to preserve the autocracy for for their son and she wrote to nicholas about it often when he was commander-in-chief of the army. alexandra likely was clinging on to any desperate hope she had of her son surviving, and may have thought with rasputin around that alexei would live a longer life. maybe she was hoping medicine could become advanced enough to save him. alexei also had long periods of good health throughout the war which may have given them hope that he would be okay.
they didn’t leave any records behind that indicate why they didn’t try to have more children, but it’s a good question since alexandra was still relatively young, like you said. it’s possible that they didn’t want to risk it knowing there was a good chance that any other sons they had would also be hemophiliacs. alexandra’s health was never good, but it seemingly got much worse after alexei’s birth and it’s possible she just wasn’t well enough for another child, especially after 5 pregnancies in relatively quick succession.
