In the unlikely setting of a stadium named after Vladimir Lenin, about 100,000 rock music fanatics waved giant American and Soviet flags Saturday as they bounced and whorled to the thundery sound of heavy metal bands from the two superpowers.
The event was the first of two weekend benefit concerts devoted to fighting drug use in both countries.Most of the bands came from the United States - Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, Scorpions, Ozzy Osbourne and Cinderella - along with 60 moving vans of equipment. From the Soviet Union came three Soviet bands - Nuance, Brigada S and Gorky Park - and fans who were, by and large, indistinguishable from fans at American concerts.
Lenin Stadium, Moscow's biggest soccer field, was filled to overflowing for Saturday's concert. Tickets, at $16 to $42, probably were a record for this low-cost capital.
The box office take, plus sales of 32,000 T-shirts at $32 each, will go to a new Soviet organization, The Fund to Combat Narcotics Addiction. The Make a Difference Foundation, an anti-drug organization based in Raleigh, N.C., will benefit from sales of an album dedicated to rock stars who died of overdoses, and a four-hour pay-per-view cable TV broadcast of the concert in the United States Sunday night.
Hundreds of Moscow policemen, most of them wearing earplugs, patrolled the stadium. After a week of rain, the weather cooperated and the audience - mostly young, many wearing leather, others in the kind of English-language T-shirts for McDonald's, MTV and the Hard Rock Cafe that every Moscow teen-ager seems to have - was good-natured and noisy.
Fans near the front of the stadium waved American and Soviet flags - even an American Confederate flag. In between acts, the crowd whiled away the time with another American import, the wave.