In 1991, a massive heavy metal concert in Moscow appeared to usher in a new era. Now, with the post-Soviet era seemingly coming to a close, RyuSpaeth looks at that show and other artifacts of the false dawn
Photo: Massimo Alabresi/AP/Shutterstock McDonald’s announced this week that it would cease operations in Russia as part of a global push to isolate Vladimir Putin’s government. The news was met with dismay by those who recalled when the Golden Arches first arrived in Moscow in 1990, a gleaming harbinger of a new and more hopeful era.
The video, part of a concert documentary called For Those About to Rock: Monsters in Moscow, captures a nation in the flux of late perestroika. Red Army soldiers have been called in to do crowd control, clashing against a seething sea of concertgoers. The show’s organizers repeatedly come on stage to plead with the crowd to refrain from violence, lest the authorities shut it down. “Remember why we are here,” they say, “to celebrate our victory.
We all know what happened in the decade that followed: the disaster of “shock therapy” economics, the plundering of Russian industry by a cabal of oligarchs, the rise of Putin. As sweet as that dvoini gamburger may have tasted, the promise of western-style capitalism proved hollow. “What an incredibly happy time!” writes Svetlana Alexievich in Secondhand Time, her account of the Soviet Union’s dissolution and its tragic aftermath.
Norge Siste Nytt, Norge Overskrifter
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