After twelve hours sweating in a 50 year-old Soviet train, Lesya and I were treated to a view of the signature landmarks of Donetsk: huge mounds of industrial refuse. No golden hills, no majestic purple mountains, no white cliffs, no windswept peaks -- slag, big heaps of slag. Slag was even the symbol on our Kyiv-Donetsk train.

SlagDonetsk was born and raised on mining and metallurgy so I suppose having the leftover ore lying around may bring a sense of comfort. The Welsh investor John Hughes created the city in the late 1800's and named it after himself - Yuzivka. A few decades later Russians forcibly welcomed the eastern part of Ukraine into their USSR club and decided Yuzivka was a capitalist-parasite name. Picking a new name randomly out of a hat, they came up with Stalino. Well, it turns out the new name happened to resemble that of a mass-murdering despot, so they finally settled on Donetsk.

I can't help but wonder if Don Trump had anything to do with this.

The slag itself is fascinating. The average mound rises about 50 feet into the air, and since Donetsk is in the steppe (a misnomer, if you ask me, since this means the area is Kansas-flat), the mounds tower over everything. The slag itself very rocky and powdery with rust; it resembles light brown chalk -- you could even write with it if you wanted.

Founder Hughes (from Wikipedia)The friend of mine in Donetsk that we were visiting would occasionally go for summer picnics on the slagheaps with fellow Americans. More near than on, actual since their brittle texture makes them a poor foundation for sitting on.

The most noticeable feature of Donetsk after the slag is the Soviet urban-suburban all-terrain apartment complexes. What image can express the bludgeoning ugliness of these buildings to those whose eyes have not been offended by them?

1) Stacks of cement shipping pallets

2) Beehives of the Undead

3) Gingerbread houses built by morbid and unimaginative children

To be fair, these buildings have not been exclusively visited upon Donetsk. Every city in Ukraine is circled by the square gray slabs of concrete, and every small town center is dominated by them. I once (on a dare) visited a town of 7,000 people in central Ukraine with no stoplight, one "good" restaurant recklessly infringing on the copyright of "Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers," and a number of 2 and 3 story apartment buildings. That being said, it doesn't help that Donetsk is flat and trees there are scarce.

Steely Defenders of StalinoFor historical significance in the city you have Soviet monuments. After extensive cross-comparison I have come to the conclusion that the figures in these monuments are best understood as the exact opposite of the characters in Winnie the Pooh. Instead of warm, fuzzy creatures filled with meekness and love they are flinty soldiers and workers that have rejected flexibility as being for pansy bourgeoisie. I'm ashamed to say it, but stiff as they are, they do have a kind of stormtrooper coolness to them.

I visited the biggest and bleakest of the statues on a day that was much too bright and cheerful. The huge black worker and soldier, idealized beyond all traces of humanity, stood against a happy blue sky and fluffy white clouds. They were meant to commemorate the heroic defense of Stalino against the Nazis. It must have been a tough decision for the inhabitants -- Who should they defend against? I was happy when a grandmother and her grandkids distracted me from the lifeless statues.

Most of these statues, especially in the west, were torn down. The remaining statues are usually the subject of agonized debate. One big Kyiv magazines includes a question about whether or not to tear down a central Kyiv statue of Lenin in its weekly interviews with the famous and powerful of Ukraine. "No, for the sake of cultural heritage," is the answer I usually see.

There isn't much debate about the statues in Donetsk. It was in Donetsk that the Communist Party, after being banned during independence, rose up again two years later like ashes from a phoenix.

Donetsk is so Communist even the air here is red. There's a joke in Ukraine that a couple guys from Donetsk visit the Carpathian Mountains in the west and when they arrive one of them collapses. People stop to help and they get the doctors and nobody can revive the man. Then his friend slaps his forehead. He picks up the unconscious man and sets him down behind their car with his nose in the exhaust pipe. Then he turns on the car and the man wakes up with a start, gasping heavily.

Donetsk has always been a tough place, and I can't say I'm likely to go vacationing there again. But I do remember one uplifting sight. Amidst all the leftover Soviet architecture was a statue and a poster of Sergey Bubka, a multiple-gold-medal-winning Olympic pole-vaulter. As a product of the rigorous Soviet athletics program, Bubka was one of the great success stories of the period, but he didn't disappear after 1991. The poster was of the new Bubka -- the successful, well-dressed capitalist advertising mobile phones.

[A couple additional pictures can be found in our Donetsk travel pics]