During early Mardi Gras celebrations hundreds of years ago, masks were a way for their wearers to escape class constraints and social demands. Mask wearers could mingle with people of all different classes and could be whomever they desired, at least for a few days.
Rasputin (song) - Composition.  1 Rasputin references the hope held by Tsaritsa Alexandra Fyodorovna that Grigori Rasputin would heal her hemophiliac son, Tsarevich Alexei of Russia. It also claims that Rasputin was Alexandra's paramour: Ra Ra Rasputin: lover of the Russian queen â there was a cat that really was gone.
Rasputin still was not dead at this point, so he was clubbed by the nobles, wrapped into a sheet with his hands and feet tied and thrown into the icy Neva River. The autopsy revealed that he died from drowning but escaped the sheet and bonds. Source: Century of Change : Europe from 1789 to 1918 by E. Alyn Mitchner and R. Joanne Tuffs. He was assassinated by a group of aristocrats led by members of the royal family, the Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich and Prince Felix Yusupov.