Monsters of Rock Moscow ’91: Riots dvring the show

An estimated crowd of 1.6 to 2 million people are said to have attended the Monsters Of Rock festival at the Tushino Airfield in Moscow, September 28, 1991. The event featured bands such as AC/DC, Metallica, Pantera, The Black Crowes, Mötley Crüe, and Queensryche.

30 Years since Moscow’s Monsters of Rock Remembering Russia’s biggest-ever rock festival featuring Metallica’s all-time greatest performance and miraculously zero fatalities

On September 28, 1991, the Tushino Airfield in Moscow hosted the Monsters of Rock international music festival. AC/DC, Metallica, the Black Crowes, and Pantera all performed, while the metal band Electro Shock Therapy represented the Soviet Union. The event attracted a crowd of more than 500,000 people, making it the largest rock concert in the history of both the USSR and the Russian Federation. There were also violent clashes between the public, the police, and even the military, which was summoned from neighboring areas to maintain order. Journalist Alexander Morsin gathered accounts from the festival’s organizers and headliners and tracked down what was written abroad about the event in its glorious aftermath.

In September 1991, Moscow music fans were preparing for the most improbable concert of their lives: The Rolling Stones, U2, Bob Dylan, the Eurythmics, and Peter Gabriel among other world-class musicians would soon perform in the capital (Moskovsky Komsomolets and Kommersant listed 11 artists). And they were set to play at the same event: an “international freedom festival” to celebrate democracy’s recent victory over the State Committee on the State of Emergency in the failed August Putsch. 

One of the first musicians to speak out in support of the “defenders of the Russian White House” was Rolling Stones vocalist Mick Jagger. The Daily News quoted a letter from Jagger where he wrote, “We’re rooting for you!” in a column titled “Mick and Boris: What a Team!” referring to future Russian President Boris Yeltsin (then the leader of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic). 

Soviet music critic Artemy Troitsky (who had already published several books in the West at the time) received a letter from Jagger “celebrating Boris Yeltsin’s impressive triumph.” During the coup attempt, Troitsky was the one most often in touch with foreign celebrities, and he negotiated their travel to Moscow. After the crisis, Troitsky reportedly said, “Mick’s support means more to young Soviet people than any politician’s pledge.”  

By mid-September, however, the list of confirmed headliners for the festival was significantly reduced, and the event itself was postponed by at least a week. Several days later, plans for a massive rock concert at either Luzhniki Stadium or Manezhnaya Square collapsed entirely when organizers couldn’t finalize agreements with any of the performers who’d been announced.  

A large-scale concert nevertheless took place, albeit somewhere else with a completely different lineup… [+]