Occurring during the glasnost era, it was one of first hard rock and heavy metal acts from abroad that were granted permission to perform in the capital city, (being the first the ten shows the British band Uriah Heep played from 7 to 16 December 1987 at the Olympic Stadium).

[7][8] [9] [10] [11] [12] * = Black Sabbath songs [13] [14] [15] [15] Stairway to Heaven/Highway to Hell was a 1989 compilation album featuring bands that performed at the Moscow Music Peace Festival.

The concert was put together by the Make a Difference Foundation, its founder, rock producer and manager Doc McGhee, Stas Namin[17][18] and other major players in the Soviet Union and the United States.

It is often stated that McGhee agreed to bring his artists to Moscow after becoming involved in a drug scandal himself and wishing to avoid a jail sentence, but he explicitly denied that in 2011.

When Bon Jovi closed the show, they used pyrotechnics, which Mötley Crüe had been told they could not do (McGhee claims it was a malfunction on one side of the stadium that he did not hear because he was backstage).

[19] The concert was also often chided by the bands themselves as being hypocritical, as many of the musicians were drinking or using drugs at the time despite the ties with the Make a Difference Foundation.

The event became known for inspiring the song "Wind of Change" by the Scorpions, a ballad which became a soundtrack to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of Soviet Union The Crooked Media podcast "Winds of Change" [20] provides some evidence to suggest that Doc McGhee was covertly leveraged by the US Government to produce this concert as a vehicle to create an origin story for the Scorpions song as part of a secret culture operation to influence the Soviet government.