Connecting the Dots from Rasputin to the Holocaust

Connecting the Missing Dots in Major Historical Events

Earlier this month I’d published an article laying out the surprisingly strong case that a tumultuous love affair with a beautiful young actress had been a central cause of World War II, the greatest military conflict in all of human history.

• The War of Goebbels’ Czech Mistress
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 8, 2025 • 6,700 Words

I noted that in nearly 90 years no one else had ever properly connected those dots together and thereby presented the unexpected historical sequence of events that ultimately shaped our entire modern world. As I explained near the beginning: Martyrs to the Unspeak... Douglass, James W. Check Amazon for Pricing.

One major reason that both mainstream and revisionist historians have failed to present the full chain of events is that nearly all those individuals have remained unaware of certain crucial elements, and a jigsaw puzzle that is missing one or more large pieces can never be properly completed.

A fact-checking run by OpenAI’s extremely powerful Deep Research AI fully confirmed the likely accuracy of all my historical claims, then correctly summarized the sequence of events as follows:

Verification: Each link in the chain is verified as factual in our findings:

Affair ➜ Goebbels’ personal crisis: True (Goebbels nearly lost his position).

Personal crisis ➜ Kristallnacht instigation: True (evidence indicates Goebbels sought to redeem himself through radical action).

Kristallnacht ➜ international outrage & British policy shift: Largely true. Kristallnacht was a PR disaster for Hitler. While the immediate cause for Britain’s war guarantee was the March 1939 occupation of Czech lands, the cumulative effect of Nazi barbarism (including Kristallnacht) had by then destroyed any sympathy or trust. Chamberlain faced public and parliamentary pressure to stand up to Hitler partly because events like Kristallnacht had revealed the Nazis’ brutal nature en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org. Roosevelt specifically cited Kristallnacht in speeches to galvanize American public opinion against Hitler. So Kristallnacht did influence Western attitudes, stiffening resolve against further Nazi aggression.

British hard line ➜ War outbreak: True as discussed (the British guarantee gave Poland confidence to refuse negotiation, Hitler attacked Poland expecting it might be a local war but Britain/France declared war – thus world war began)

Although this was certainly one of the most extreme and dramatic examples of an important story that was completely missing from our standard historical narrative, there were others that I have also discovered over the years.

For example, I have sometimes briefly sketched out one of these involving the First World War and the intertwined Bolshevik Revolution, certainly two of the most momentous events of the twentieth century.

Once again, large but missing historical pieces have prevented generations of our scholars from producing a complete account of what had actually happened and why.

The Murder of Rasputin and the Bolshevik Revolution

Our standard historiography sometimes errs by presenting important events in isolation, failing to properly emphasize their close, casual relationships even when these obviously existed.

Consider, for example, the well-known story of Grigory Rasputin, one of the most notorious figures of late Czarist Russia, a peasant faith-healer who came to exercise a great deal of influence over the Russian imperial court in the years prior to the 1917 downfall of Czarism.

My basic history textbooks had always portrayed Rasputin as a rather sinister figure, someone who derived his influence from his perceived ability to treat the severe illnesses of the young Czaravitch Alexei, the hemophiliac heir to the throne. Alexei’s bouts with uncontrollable bleeding had sometimes brought him close to death, and his desperate mother, the Czarina Alexandra, came to believe that Rasputin’s spiritual powers were responsible for the survival of her only son.

Rasputin took full advantage of the hold he gained over the imperial family, and he became hugely unpopular across much of Russian society and especially among members of the Czarist court. His bitter enemies included close relatives of the imperial family, who regarded him as a dangerous, evil charlatan.

Rumors even circulated that Rasputin was sexually involved with Alexandra and all of her young daughters, and although these stories were almost certainly false, anger over his malign influence greatly damaged the popularity of the ruling Czarist regime, finally provoking his 1916 murder by a group of senior Russian aristocrats. The 6,000 word Wikipedia article on Rasputin effectively summarizes all of these historical facts.

Despite Rasputin’s death, the Czarist government had already been fatally weakened, and during the First World War the repeated military defeats that Russia suffered at the hands of Imperial Germany finally led to its revolutionary overthrow in 1917, the year after Rasputin was killed.

The moderate constitutional government that came to power was then overthrown later that same year in the October Revolution, a revolutionary coup d’etat by Lenin and his Bolsheviks. The Communist regime thus established cast a very dark shadow over the rest of the twentieth century, provoking numerous wars and revolutionary upheavals that The Black Book of Communism claimed were eventually responsible for as many as 100 million deaths.

I’d absorbed all of the facts in this standard narrative from my basic history textbooks, and although they were certainly true, the story they presented was also rather incomplete and even misleading. I discovered some of the missing connections a few years ago when I read The Russian Revolution, a widely praised reanalysis of that seminal event by historian Sean McMeekin, published in the centennial anniversary year of 2017.

I regard McMeekin as one of the very best of the current generation of Russia specialists. He had already published a number of deeply researched and well-received books on Russian and Soviet history, but I found his reinterpretation of the Russian Revolution especially noteworthy.

Among other elements, he connected certain important dots in ways that were entirely new to me, as I explained in a late 2022 article:

A couple of years ago I’d read Sean McMeekin’s 2017 history The Russian Revolution, an outstanding, meticulous reconstruction of the complex and contingent circumstances that led to the 1917 fall of the Czarist Regime and the subsequent triumph of Lenin’s Bolsheviks.

The prologue is devoted to the murder of Grigory Rasputin, the peasant faith-healer who exercised such enormous influence over the Czar and his family that although he held no official position, he probably ranked for many years as the third most powerful figure in the Russian Empire. Moreover, his late December 1916 death at the hands of a conspiratorial group that included top members of Russia’s elite seems to have been an important factor in destabilizing the regime, leading to its collapse in the February Revolution just a couple of months later.

Although I’d certainly been aware that Rasputin had considerable influence, I’d never regarded him as “the third most powerful figure in the Russian Empire.” But McMeekin made a strong case for this, explaining that for years the peasant faith healer had regularly made or broken top government ministers. Indeed, just the month before his murder, he had played a central role in the appointment of a new prime minister and the replacement of the foreign minister. Czarist aristocrats were incensed that a crude former peasant exercised such enormous political power, and their hatred was obviously a major factor behind his killing.

I’d also never realized that the revolution overthrowing the Czarist regime came just a few weeks after Rasputin’s death, and McMeekin persuasively argued that this timing was far from coincidental. The murderers were too high-born and powerful to be prosecuted so the killing went unpunished. But the Czar and his wife were outraged over the brutal murder of their friend and spiritual advisor, and their angry reaction further estranged them from Russia’s leading political elites, all of whom, whether liberal or reactionary, had detested Rasputin and his outsize influence.

Russia’s unsuccessful war against Imperial Germany had already entered its fourth year, and the resulting stresses and strains were obviously the primary factor behind the popular unrest that struck the capital city of Petrograd in the early months of 1917. But it was the complete alienation of the Russian political elites from the Czar that then forced his abdication, and that alienation had grown far greater in the aftermath of Rasputin’s murder. Without that killing, Nicholas might well have managed to remain in power.

Once the February Revolution had overthrown the three-century long absolutist reign of the Romanov Dynasty, the new liberal and constitutional government subsequently established was far more vulnerable. Weakened by further military defeats and a series of abortive and unsuccessful coup attempts and putsches, it was finally overthrown by the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution of 1917.

Without the February Revolution, it is very difficult to imagine that the Bolsheviks would have ever come to power. At the beginning of 1917, Lenin, Trotsky, and nearly all the other Bolshevik leaders were in exile, and they were only able to return to Russia and begin their plotting because the new government granted a sweeping political amnesty. The liberal constitutional government was relatively fragile, and as it foolishly decided to fully continue the unpopular war against Germany, further military defeats and heavy casualties further weakened it.

Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks promised peace, and as McMeekin demonstrated, the Germans therefore secretly provided heavy funding for their political propaganda efforts, greatly assisting their chances of gaining power. So according to this causal sequence, Rasputin’s murder was probably a crucial factor behind the February Revolution of early 1917, while that latter event set the stage for the Bolshevik Revolution in October of that same year.

Although it’s far too simplistic to say that the assassination of Rasputin ultimately brought the Bolsheviks to power less than a year later, I think that a good case can be made if Rasputin had not been killed, the Czarist regime might have continued to muddle along while Lenin and the Bolsheviks would have remained foreign exiles, with their later lives and careers being confined to only the most obscure of historical footnotes. DMSO Healing Guide: Di... Carter, Martha Check Amazon for Pricing.

I am hardly a Russian specialist, but prior to reading McMeekin’s book, I had never considered the importance of Rasputin’s killing, and his name scarcely made any appearance in the thick books that I had read on the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet Communism. For example, Adam Ulam’s classic 1965 volume The Bolsheviks only glancingly mentioned Rasputin in two short sentences across its 600 pages, which is two sentences more than can be found in the nearly 1,500 pages of E.H. Carr’s monumental three volume series The Bolshevik Revolution. The six authors of The Black Book of Communism, published in 1999 by Harvard University Press, completely omitted Rasputin’s name from their 850 pages of text.

The murder of the peasant faith healer was certainly not as central to the Bolshevik Revolution as were the blunders of Czar Nicholas or the military setbacks in his war against Germany or the successful political strategies of Lenin and Trotsky. But I do think that Rasputin’s life and death should have at least been given several paragraphs in those 500 or 1,000 pages.

Instead, this near-total silence leads me to suspect that few of these eminent past historians of Russian and Soviet history had recognized McMeekin’s strikingly obvious argument that the completely unpunished murder of “the third most powerful man” in Czarist Russia might have been closely connected to the downfall of the entire regime a few weeks later.

We should keep in mind that the political elites who had so bitterly hated Rasputin were the same elements who then successfully overthrew the Czar who had long supported and protected him. By confirming their total legal impunity, the murder emboldened those elites, and a Czar who had proven himself too weak to punish Rasputin’s killers was a Czar who could then be removed in what almost amounted to a palace coup.

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