At which Moscow airfield did Metallica perform during the 1991 tour supporting The Black Album?

Metallica performed at Tushino Airfield in Moscow during the 1991 tour supporting The Black Album.

The concert took place on September 28, 1991, during the European Monsters of Rock tour. It was described as the first free outdoor Western rock concert in Soviet history and became one of the most famous performances associated with Metallica’s breakthrough period.

The event attracted an enormous crowd, although estimates varied considerably. Contemporary and later accounts commonly cite figures ranging from roughly 150,000 to 500,000 people, while unofficial estimates reached as high as 1.6 million. Because crowd measurement was difficult at the open-air site, no single estimate is universally accepted.

Tushino Airfield is not one of Moscow’s main commercial airports, which explains why the venue is sometimes misidentified as Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo, or Vnukovo. The show was held at the airfield as a major outdoor concert site. It also appears in the documentary A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica through footage of “Harvester of Sorrow.”