The Letter: London, Kharkiv and the Civilian Art of Defiance

By Matthew Parish

Tuesday 29 September 2026

There is something almost offensively ordinary about the photograph. A woman walks through a London street wearing an elegant skirt, jacket and hat, carrying what appears to be a letter. Her shoes are wholly unsuitable for climbing across rubble, while beside her stands a pillar box, that most mundane and reassuring of British objects, apparently still awaiting the day’s post. Behind her, however, buildings have been ripped open and masonry lies scattered across the pavement.

The photograph is attributed to Sir Cecil Beaton, the celebrated English photographer, designer and artist who was commissioned by Britain’s Ministry of Information to document the Home Front during the Second World War. Beaton is remembered principally for glamorous portraits, theatre, fashion and his photographs of high society, but from 1940 he also became an extraordinarily prolific war photographer. His photographs of bomb-damaged London were circulated internationally, including in the still-neutral United States, where images of British civilians continuing their lives amidst destruction served an obvious diplomatic purpose.

The image reproduced here is commonly captioned The Letter, London, 1940. Whether one concentrates upon the woman, the letter or the pillar box, its message is much the same. The German Luftwaffe can destroy the buildings, but the post will still be collected. Somebody has written a letter and somebody else is going to receive it; the institutions of ordinary life, down to the most trivial human communication, will continue.

For anyone who has spent time in Kharkiv during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the photograph has an immediate familiarity. Change the clothes, replace the pillar box with a mobile telephone, substitute Shahed drones, ballistic missiles and glide bombs for Heinkel and Dornier bombers, and there is something recognisable about the scene. The rubble is different, the architecture is different and the technology of killing has changed almost beyond recognition. Yet the peculiar civilian response to bombardment remains remarkably similar.

This is the story of two cities separated by more than eighty years, and of one stubborn proposition that strategic bombing has repeatedly struggled to overcome. You cannot necessarily persuade a city to surrender merely by making its inhabitants afraid, because fear is a far more complicated political emotion than those who employ terror often imagine.

Fifty-seven nights

The Blitz began in earnest on 7 September 1940, Black Saturday. Hundreds of German aircraft attacked London’s docks and surrounding districts, and approximately 430 people were killed and some 1,600 seriously injured on that first day. Thereafter London was bombed for 57 consecutive nights, while raids upon the capital and other British cities continued periodically until May 1941. Across Britain, more than 40,000 civilians were killed during the Blitz.

The strategic theory behind bombing civilian centres was not especially complicated. Destruction was intended not merely to eliminate industrial capacity, transport infrastructure and military facilities but also to weaken civilian morale. If ordinary people became sufficiently frightened, exhausted and angry, perhaps they would demand that their government bring the war to an end.

That theory encountered a difficulty because human beings do not always react to terror in the way their attackers anticipate. Bombardment can produce panic and despair, but it can also produce fury, solidarity and an intensified determination not to give the attacker what he wants.

Londoners were certainly frightened. The later mythology of the Blitz can sometimes obscure this elementary fact, because people did not stand cheerfully in their gardens admiring incoming German bombers. They ran for shelters, slept in Underground stations, worried about their children, mourned relatives and returned from nights underground to discover that their houses had disappeared. The celebrated British “Blitz spirit” should not be allowed to transform frightened civilians into cartoon characters incapable of ordinary human emotions.

Nevertheless, the city continued. Buses ran, shops reopened and firefighters fought enormous conflagrations. Clerks returned to offices with broken windows, families recovered furniture from shattered houses, people queued for food, lovers met and children went to school wherever schools could operate. Letters were written and delivered, while women walked through rubble in good shoes.

Kharkiv

On 24 February 2022, another European city woke to the proposition that overwhelming military violence might persuade it to submit. Kharkiv was an especially striking candidate for such a theory because it lies barely forty kilometres from the Russian border and Russian is widely spoken there. The city had profound historical, cultural, commercial and family connections with Russia, and if the Kremlin expected any major Ukrainian city rapidly to accommodate the invading forces, Kharkiv might have appeared an obvious possibility.

Instead, it became one of the great surprises of the war. Russian forces approached the city during the opening days of the invasion and fighting took place on its streets, yet Kharkiv did not fall. Thereafter the city endured extensive bombardment involving missiles, artillery, cluster munitions and other weapons, while apartment buildings, schools, shops, places of worship and medical facilities were damaged or destroyed.

The bombardment did not end with the failure of the initial Russian assault. Kharkiv has remained within reach of a formidable assortment of Russian weapons, and successive phases of the war have brought missiles, drones and glide bombs against the city and its surrounding region. Attacks upon Ukraine’s energy infrastructure have added another dimension to civilian life under bombardment, with electricity, heating and water becoming vulnerable alongside buildings and human lives.

Kharkiv has therefore experienced something London never did during the Blitz: years rather than months in which aerial attack has formed part of the background rhythm of civilian existence. People have learned to distinguish explosions by sound, to conduct conversations through air-raid alerts and to make everyday calculations about where to sit, where to sleep and whether to interrupt whatever they happen to be doing when another warning appears upon their telephones.

The mythology of resilience

There is a danger in comparisons of this kind. “Resilience” is one of those words that journalists use so frequently in wartime that it can become almost meaningless, and worse, it can romanticise suffering. Nobody ought to have to become resilient because somebody else is firing missiles at their home.

The people of London in 1940 were not performing heroism for future generations, and neither are the people of Kharkiv today. They were, and are, trying to live. That distinction matters because the most interesting similarity between the two cities is precisely the ordinariness of their responses.

Cecil Beaton understood this instinctively. He did not need to photograph a soldier firing a rifle to communicate defiance, because the woman beside the pillar box is more powerful precisely because she is doing something so inconsequential. Somewhere there is a letter that needs posting. The Luftwaffe has reduced the surrounding buildings to rubble, yet the letter is still going into the post.

Walk around Kharkiv and equivalents are everywhere. A café opens after an air raid and somebody sweeps broken glass from a pavement. Municipal workers repair a window with plywood, a tram resumes its route and a restaurant serves dinner while an air-raid application on everyone’s telephone warns that missiles may be approaching. People complain about prices, go on dates, walk dogs, argue with taxi drivers and buy flowers. When the electricity disappears, generators begin humming; when it returns, everyone plugs everything in again.

These things seem trivial only until one understands what bombing a city seeks to accomplish psychologically. Normality itself becomes a form of resistance when somebody is attempting to make normality impossible, because every resumed routine demonstrates the limits of violence as an instrument for governing human behaviour.

London’s Underground and Kharkiv’s Metro

During the Blitz, London Underground stations became shelters. Thousands descended beneath the streets carrying blankets, bags, children and whatever modest comforts they could manage, and the Underground acquired a second identity as both transport infrastructure and enormous communal refuge.

Kharkiv’s Metro underwent much the same transformation in 2022. Its stations became shelters almost immediately, with families sleeping on platforms and children playing underground while people brought mattresses, food, pets and possessions into spaces originally designed merely for waiting for trains. Eventually classrooms were established underground as Kharkiv adapted its education system to the continuing danger of missile attack.

The similarity tells us something important about cities. Their resilience does not arise solely from individual courage, because it also comes from infrastructure and institutions. Underground railways become shelters, municipal authorities improvise, doctors continue working and electricity engineers repair networks that may be struck again. Volunteers distribute food while teachers discover ways to teach children beneath the earth.

A resilient city is therefore a collective organism rather than merely a collection of individually brave people. London’s survival during the Blitz was not simply the consequence of some supposedly unique British national character, nor should Kharkiv’s endurance be explained merely by invoking an abstract Ukrainian heroism. Both cities possessed institutions capable of adapting to catastrophe and populations willing to cooperate with those institutions while simultaneously improvising around their inevitable failures.

The limits of comparison

Nevertheless, London in 1940 and Kharkiv after 2022 are not the same story. The weapons are different, the strategic circumstances are different and the political contexts cannot simply be collapsed into one another. German bombers had to fly over Britain and could be intercepted by fighters and anti-aircraft guns, whereas modern Kharkiv faces ballistic missiles that may arrive with extraordinarily little warning, cruise missiles, drones, artillery and glide bombs. The contemporary smartphone provides civilians with warnings unimaginable in 1940, yet modern weapons may also compress the interval between warning and explosion.

The wars themselves are different as well. Britain’s capital was not situated close to a land front and German soldiers never reached London’s suburbs. Kharkiv, by contrast, spent the opening weeks of the full-scale invasion with Russian forces fighting on its outskirts and briefly within the city itself. The front has subsequently moved, but the Russian border remains where geography put it.

London also knew that behind it stood the remainder of Britain, protected by the Channel and defended by the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force. Kharkiv is a frontier metropolis, and its geography cannot be altered. Even after this war eventually ends, Russia will remain close, which means that Kharkiv’s inhabitants must contemplate not only how to survive the present war but how their city can flourish after it.

That makes Kharkiv’s psychological achievement particularly striking without requiring us to pretend that its experience is identical to London’s. Its citizens have not merely endured bombardment; they have had to construct a theory of the city’s future in spite of geography.

Bombing and political psychology

The broader lesson joining London and Kharkiv concerns the recurrent strategic error involved in bombing civilians. Fear is not politically predictable, and therefore the assumption that enough terror will necessarily translate into political submission has repeatedly proved unreliable.

Bombing may demoralise, cause populations to flee, damage industrial production and overwhelm public services. Under some circumstances air power can make an enormous military difference, so it would be foolish to derive from London or Kharkiv the universal proposition that strategic bombing never works. Yet terror can also create solidarity, particularly when the identity of the attacker and the purpose of the violence are obvious.

A person who previously regarded politics as remote suddenly discovers that geopolitics has demolished the apartment next door. Neighbours who barely spoke begin helping one another, while political abstractions become intensely personal. The attacker ceases to be something encountered through newspapers and becomes the reason there is no electricity in the kitchen.

Something comparable happened in Britain. Hitler’s bombing campaign did not produce the political collapse Germany sought, and instead the Blitz became incorporated into British national memory as evidence that the country would not submit. German attacks inflicted enormous civilian casualties and infrastructure damage, yet Britain continued its war effort and its political leadership remained intact.

Russia has encountered a related phenomenon in Kharkiv. A city whose Russian cultural connections might once have appeared to Moscow to constitute a strategic advantage experienced Russian missiles falling upon its residential districts. Whatever complexities of language and identity existed before 2022, bombardment gave the relationship between Kharkiv and Russia an entirely new and brutal dimension.

Destruction intended to weaken resistance can therefore strengthen the reasons for resisting. That is one of warfare’s recurring paradoxes, and it is one that governments contemplating attacks upon civilian populations have repeatedly underestimated.

The letter

This brings us back to Cecil Beaton’s photograph. Its brilliance lies in the contrast between catastrophe and manners: the woman has apparently dressed properly before going outside, she is not scrambling through ruins in panic and the pillar box remains upright while buildings around it have collapsed.

The composition almost invites us to imagine the machinery of the British state continuing invisibly beyond the edges of the photograph. The letter will be collected, sorted, transported and delivered. Behind this apparently insignificant civilian act lies an entire network of people and institutions continuing to perform their functions despite the attempt to smash the city around them.

Perhaps that is why the image speaks so directly to contemporary Kharkiv. Wars are ultimately contests not only between armies but between systems: one system destroys while another repairs. One fires a missile at an electricity substation and another sends engineers to restore the electricity. One blows windows out and another boards them up. One attempts to empty a city while another keeps its Metro running.

The spectacular event is the explosion, but the strategically important event may be what happens afterwards. Somebody picks up a broom while somebody else opens the café; a tram begins moving again and a family returns home. In London somebody wrote a letter and trusted that the postal service would somehow deliver it, while in Kharkiv somebody hears the generators start and orders another coffee.

Two cities that said no

Britain and Ukraine are separated by geography, history, language and more than eighty years of technological change. It would be sentimental to pretend that London during the Blitz and Kharkiv during Russia’s full-scale invasion are identical experiences, because every war creates its own particular horrors and every city suffers them differently. Yet the comparison made by Ukrainian commentary associated with Beaton’s photograph — our English friends know what life under bombardment means — contains a deeper historical truth.

Britain does know, and there are still London families whose histories contain a house destroyed in 1940, a grandfather who slept in an Underground station, a relative killed by a V-2 or a grandmother who returned from evacuation to discover a street transformed. London’s contemporary prosperity can make those experiences seem impossibly remote, but beneath the modern city lies the memory of another London: darkened, burning, exhausted and determined to remain alive.

Kharkiv is living that history now. Perhaps one day photographs of today’s Kharkiv will acquire the strange distance that Cecil Beaton’s images now possess, and future generations will stare at pictures of Saltivka apartment blocks with their windows blown out, Metro stations filled with mattresses, firefighters standing among ruins and young people drinking coffee beside sandbags. They may find it difficult to imagine that ordinary people actually lived like this, and that would be a fortunate failure of imagination because it would mean peace had lasted long enough for war to become strange again.

Until then, Cecil Beaton’s woman continues her walk through the ruins of London, and more than eight decades later she has innumerable companions in Kharkiv. The buildings around her are broken and the street is covered with rubble, yet the pillar box is still standing. She has a letter to post, and the ordinary machinery of civilisation must therefore continue its work.