Rock concert for Chernobyl
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2021
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On May 31st 1986 a small group of musicians staged the first charity rock concert ever held in the USSR. It was organised in less than two weeks to raise money for the victims of the Chernobyl disaster. The nuclear reactor accident had happened just a month before in Ukraine. Some of the artists who played at the concert had been previously banned by the Soviet authorities, so the concert was a social revolution, as organiser - Artemy Troitsky explains to Rebecca Kesby.
(PHOTO Credit Sputnik: 1986 Charity concert arranged to raise funds for accident management at the Chernobyl power station. Olimpiysky sports complex.)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.5 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices. |
| 0:18.0 | What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:40.0 | Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Rebecca |
| 0:45.4 | Keshby. Today we head for Moscow in May 1986 to something of a revolution in popular culture, the first charity rock concert ever staged in the |
| 0:55.6 | USSR to raise money for the victims of the Chernobyl disaster. It's May 31st, 1986, just a month after the worst nuclear accident in history in Ukraine. |
| 1:12.4 | People have been encouraged to donate money to the victims by contributing to the state-run |
| 1:17.3 | bank account, number 904, but in an unprecedented move, a group of rock musicians has been allowed to stage a concert |
| 1:25.9 | in the Olympic Stadium in Moscow. |
| 1:28.7 | The music was interspersed with appeals to contribute to a count number 904, the Chernobyl Disaster Fund. |
| 1:34.8 | And there were television linkups with Kyiv to talk to the firemen, miners and policemen |
| 1:38.8 | who'd worked on the reactor. |
| 1:40.8 | Account 904 was the first big and visible charity event in the Soviet Union. |
| 1:48.0 | At that time it was a wholly alien concept to the country. The concert was Arceerem Eryzky's idea. He was a music journalist, but what made it all |
| 1:58.2 | the more extraordinary was that even just a year earlier it would have been impossible. |
| 2:03.2 | Before Mikhail Gorbachev took over a Soviet leader in 1985 and introduced the idea of reform or Perestroika, most rock music had been frowned upon as a Western decadence and |
| 2:14.3 | our Chemy himself had been blacklisted. In the beginning of the 80s big campaign |
| 2:20.3 | against rock music and Western cultural influence in general has been held. |
| 2:26.4 | And also I've been completely under an official band as pro-Western anti-Soviet who promoted ideologically wrong rock music. |
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