The Court of the Last Tsar

The salaries of people employed in the imperial theaters -- the Mariinsky, the Alexandrinsky, and the Maly Theaters in St. Petersburg, and the Bolshoi and the Maly in Moscow -- including directors, dancers, teachers, and pupils, were also paid from the Civil List, as all were considered to be members of the Emperor's Household. At the end of every season, as Mathilde Kschessinska remembered, all of the pupils at the Imperial Ballet School and the dancers in the ballet itself received presents from the emperor. "In most cases," she wrote, "it consisted of a jewel in gold or silver, enriched sometimes with precious stones according to the class of gift and always bearing a crown or Imperial eagle. Male dancers usually received a gold watch. On the whole, these gifts were not particularly beautiful." The annual cost of funding the imperial theaters alone amounted to some 2 million rubles a year. Also included were the upkeep of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, the Alexander III Museum of Russian Arts, and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.

Thus the emperor's outlay each year was certainly enormous. According to the Romanovs in exile, Nicholas was lucky to survive from financial year to financial year, so strained were his resources.

The Court of the Last Tsar: Pomp, Power, and Pageantry in the Reign of Nicholas II by Greg King. 2006. Page 235.