Eighty years ago this weekend, as British and Irish troops fought and died on the Western Front, Irish republicans staged a coup in the centre of Dublin. Living, as I now do, on the northern edge of Derbyshire (North West Water again), exceptional weather brings peat with the water supply which is clearly visible in the bath, accepted as roughage in the tea pot, but being soft does not fur up my kettle. M Ani HarrisNew Mills,Cheshire. Sir: Judy Allen asks (letter, 3 April) if she is missing out in never eating turkey eggs. Sir: You make reference to "the fur in Lancashire kettles" (leading article; "Gummer needs a watertight plan", 1 April). As one who has supped North West Water and the best that Bedfordshire has to offer I'm under the impression that fur is what you get in southern kettles but not in those of the Lancashire I grew up in. Yet the interests of neither the West nor Russia are served by the revival of a new Eurasian empire and military superpower which would be likely to lead to a new Cold War, a new arms race, Russia's repudiation of international treaties (CFE and Start 2) domestic and inter-state conflict within the CIS and the end of reform and democratisation in Russia.Taras KuzioResearch FellowCentre for Russian andEast European StudiesUniversity of Birmingham.

Both Russian presidential candidates see Ukraine as the "jewel in the crown" which would satisfy their ambitions of creating a new "Union".Despite these dangerous trends the West is still making the same fatal mistake by backing the current Yeltsin leadership as it did in 1991 when it backed then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. The capital of the CIS is being moved to a newly constructed building in Moscow in 1998 and all leading posts within the CIS are dominated by Russians.In the approach to the June Russian presidential elections both leading candidates - Yeltsin and Communist leader Zyuganov - are competing as to who will build a new "Union" or former Soviet Union quickest.The 15 March Russian State Duma resolutions on reviving the USSR, passed by an overwhelming majority (with only 50 deputies voting against), reflect this trend in Russian domestic politics. This trend is not a new phenomenon, as your editorial suggests, but part of an evolution in Russian policy towards the CIS elaborated in a new "Monroe Doctrine" since early 1993 which the West saw fit to ignore or blame on the need for President Boris Yeltsin to appease nationalist voters during election campaigns. Increasingly it seems that Russia's current leaders perceive the strategic tasks of "Union" restoring as more important than domestic reform and integration into the world community of nations. Can we not have this back again - but now from Waterloo? John Mills London NW8.

Sir: Your editorial "Back in the USSR" (3 April) details the growing trend towards reintegration within the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Many of us regret the loss of the sleeper train from Calais to Milan, via Basel, with carriages on to Venice or Florence, which seems to have quite disappeared. Sir: Mr Michael Patterson (letter, 3 April) points out the speed with which one can now get from Milan to London by train. However, a day- long journey with two changes does not equal the convenience of the night services we once enjoyed. All that would have been required would have been the display of the corpse to prove beyond any doubt that Jesus was still well and truly dead. Sadly there are always cynics looking for sensational stories to disprove the resurrection They will have to do much better than this.

Still the best explanation for the preaching of the resurrection is that the tomb was empty because "he is risen; just as he said!" (Matthew 28:6).The Rev Andrew McMullonCrumlin, Co Antrim. What happens to those who do not clamour, or do it in the wrong tone? Do they deserve to suffer the ravages of fate and the torments of eternal death? For our excluding instincts infect even our most beloved texts. The noise! The people!Our conflicting brands of fervour can be shaming. The embarrassment becomes the sharper when the show turns up in your own town. The minister of the Castlemilk estate in Glasgow was once describing how a cross had been rescued from the debris of a demolished Glasgow hospital. He brandished the great brass cross from the pulpit in impressive demonstration.I asked him later - if the wreckage had revealed a crucifix, would he have waved that about in the kirk? Pass.

If, as Hans Kung says, the death of Christ is the signature of Christianity, each church still seems to think that the others are peddling forgeries.Our clamour for deliverance from the pains of fate and death has an unfortunate implication. But a chastened church might find a renewal of faith in the ordinary God who is revealed in Christ's death.Conventional belief bawls at God for recognition and for intervention. This is embarrassingly true of the teeming mass of Christian practice in history, from European painted plaster Baroque through American Honky- Tonk Gothic, to contemporary hi-tech hoopla. The Rev John Kennedy reflects today on the lessons that the death of Jesus holds for a church which, in Europe at least, appears to be shrinking as the millennium approaches.