The point of the article was to explore the role individual personalities (like Rasputin, Gavrile Princip, Kaiser Wilhelm, Lenin) play vs. the big historic trends of economy, politics, social classes etc.

Humans tend to overestime the role of individuals on history because it writes better stories. I of course don't think that Russia would still be a monarchy without Rasputin, or even that the monarchy would have survived in 1917 without him (almost all monarchies across Europe collapsed following the war).

At the same time chaos theory teaches us that small things can blow up to have large effects, and I think the details of timing can matter greatly in revolutions, so it's hard to know how important Rasputin really was. We will never know, but I still think it's worth thinking about.