A field with no agreed edge
Tushino Airfield, Moscow, 28 September 1991. The Soviet Union had weeks left to live, though the paperwork would wait until December. A coup had failed in August. Into that pause, Time Warner and local organisers put a free Monsters of Rock: AC/DC at the top of the bill, Metallica, the Black Crowes, Pantera, and the Soviet band E.S.T. James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett and Jason Newsted landed on the same field they would play. The crowd was already a problem of arithmetic. City police later spoke of about 300,000 by noon and close to half a million by evening. Organisers said more. The figure of 1.6 million, repeated for years, is a legend the day itself does not support. Hetfield’s own later memory is the honest one: a million, or half a million, nobody knew.
What the pictures do support is a horizon made of heads. Helicopters moved over the mass. At the front, men in uniform stood where a barrier should have been. Metallica opened with Enter Sandman, a song that had been in the world only since 12 August, when the Black Album came out. Then Creeping Death, Harvester of Sorrow, Fade to Black, a shortened Master of Puppets, One, Whiplash. The encore reached for Last Caress, Am I Evil? and Battery. It was daylight metal, no club ceiling to hold the low end, just air and a public that had not grown up with a pit.
Hetfield has come back to one picture more than the number. After a few songs, some of the military at the front took the uniforms off and started moving with the music. He has called it a freeing thing, people changing in front of the band. That is a better document than any attendance claim. A closed society does not undo itself because a riff asks it to. For an hour and something, on that airfield, a piece of it tried.
They estimated a million, or half a million, nobody knew really. There were plenty of military people that just started taking their uniforms off and started rocking out. It was a really freeing thing.
(James Hetfield, The Fierce Life Podcast)
AC/DC still headlined. Metallica did not steal the poster. They stole the memory, which is a different theft, and not always fair to the band that closed. What travelled out of Tushino was the photograph of scale, and the fact that Enter Sandman, barely six weeks old, already sounded like a public song. The tape, recorded by Fleetwood Mobiles, later sat inside the Black Album box, which is how a free afternoon became a catalogue entry.
Count it as you like. Half a million is already a city. A million is a boast. The concert that remains is the one Hetfield describes: an edge he could not see, a helicopter too low, and uniforms coming off because the song had made the job feel ridiculous. Metal likes to talk about freedom. For once the word had a date, a field, and a country that was about to change its name.
