Rok Protiv Terrora Music Festival. April 6, 1991, Moscow.

A not-for-profit charitable concert that took place at Moscow's Kryl'ia Sovetov Stadium on April 6, 1991, conceived by the Garik Sukachev, the leader of the rock band Brigada S. Initially the event was meant to be an act of protest against police brutality of which Sukachev and his friend Aleksandr F. Skliar of the band VaBank were victims but grew to express opposition to all forms of state-organized terror: political, social, and moral in both domestic and international spheres. The event became known for its anti-war position and became one of the first unified activist efforts on the part of the Russian rock music community. The festival received organizational support from VID television production company, the newspaper Komsomol’skaya Pravda, and Moscow’s Fili Cultural Center. The festival, which lasted eight hours, featured fourteen Soviet rock bands took part in the concert, including Alisa, DDT, Nautilus Pompilius, and Auktsyon, among others. During the press conference organized for the event, Vladimir Veselkin of Auktsyon distributed a petition that called to decriminalize homosexuality in the USSR, which gathered many signatures, including one from VID founder Vladislav List’ev. A made-for-television version of the concert, which included interviews with musicians and audience members was produced by VID and was liberally broadcast on Russian central television after the August 1991 putsch. With the notable exception of Yurii Shevchuk of DDT, many of the original festival participants grew more conservative in their political views, marking Rok Protiv Terrora as one of few unified protest efforts from the rock music community. In later interviews, Sukachev has even downplayed the ultimate significance of the event, arguing that due to the USSR’s economic collapse and rapid inflation that followed, the concert failed to raise enough funds to make a real difference.