Metallica played the 1991 Monsters of Rock finale at Tushino Airfield in Moscow during The Black Album era.
The concert took place on September 28, 1991, shortly after the album’s release. It was part of the Monsters of Rock festival tour, on which Metallica appeared alongside major rock and metal acts. The event became one of the most memorable concerts associated with the album’s early international success.
The Moscow show was described as the first free outdoor Western rock concert in Soviet history. Reports estimated the crowd in the hundreds of thousands, while some unofficial claims placed attendance much higher. Because crowd estimates vary significantly, the location and date are more reliable identifying facts than any single attendance figure.
The concert also demonstrated how quickly Metallica had expanded beyond traditional club and theater venues. The band was entering an era of enormous outdoor audiences, and the Moscow performance became a landmark of both Metallica’s touring history and the changing cultural landscape of the late Soviet period.