““When a minister impertinently threatened to resign, he seized him by the collar and shouted, ‘Shut up! When I choose to kick you out, you will hear of it in no uncertain terms!’ Politicians were ‘scoundrels’, on whose reports he would write comments like ‘what a beast!’ He often shouted, ‘as for the ministers, the devil take them’. His foreign minister Nikolai Giers was a ‘dummy’ who, he said, acted as his ‘clerk’. He tried to find a way around the ministers, and, as he struggled to absorb complex issues, he asked his three henchmen, Cherevin, Vorontsov and head of the court chancellery, General Otto Richter, to form an all-powerful triumvirate, reducing ministerial reports to short digests.””
