Volga Smashes Crowd Record

Rammstein helped this year’s Rock On The Volga pull twice as many fans as last year, leaving organiser Michael Shurygin and his team with a crowd of more than 690,000 on the Samara site in south Russia.

The free-entry event to celebrate Russia Day (June 12), which marks the founding of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the dissolution of the old Soviet Union in 1990, is supported by the local government and commercial sponsorship.

The festival is staged as close to Russia Day as the availability of international acts will allow.

“The infrastructure stood up to it very well, even though we ran out of beer towards the end of the day,” Shurygin told Pollstar. “We did have queues for the toilets,” he explained, which was hardly surprising as the crowd had got through 1 million litres of water.

Shurygin said he was expecting 450,000, which would still have made the fifth anniversary the biggest Rock On Volga he’s staged.

The previous attendances were 160,000 in 2009, 200,000 in 2010, 250,000 in 2011, and 307,000 last year.

The Russian acts supporting Rammstein June 8 included Ju-Piter, Mordor, Igor Rasteryaev, Bi-2, Okean Elzy, Leningrad, Zaz, Alisa, Korol i Shut.