The arts were indifferent to her, and she was insensible to the simplicity of true greatness. She idolized a Zuboff, but Kosciuszko was immured at St. Petersburg till the day of her death, and she never even learned his precise name. Yet she brought to society and politics much of that protean activity which was the distinction of her teacher Voltaire in the field of letters. She did much for education, and something for Russian literature. She herself wrote or collaborated in plays, whose performances the Holy Synod had to attend--and applaud--in a body. She also published translations, pamphlets, books for her grandchildren, a history of Russia to the fourteenth century, and even helped to edit a newspaper. Unlike Frederick, she did not despise the language of her country. She put her court to school, and at the "Hermitage" so many lines of Russian were learned every day. But Radistchev said: "Fear and silence reign round Czarkoe-Sielo. The silence of Death is there, for there despotism has its abode." He received the knout and Siberia, because his words were true. She lived, as he said, remote from her people. Beggars were forbidden to enter Moscow, lest she should see them; but a rumor ran after her return from the South that Alexis Orloff led her into a barn where were laid out the bodies of all who had died of hunger on the day of her triumphal entry. Like Peter the Great, she even in some ways intensified serfdom. A hundred fifty thousand "peasants of the crown" were handed over by her as serfs to her lovers. Their proprietors could send them with hard labor to Siberia; they could give them fifteen thousand blows for a trifling offence; a Soltikoff tortured seventy-five to death. _Sed ignoti perierunt mortibus illi!_ the day will come, but not yet.