How it was 10/18/1997 (1997)

VI World Festival of Youth and Students, 1957.

By July 28, 1957, 34 thousand foreigners had arrived in Moscow.

It was a holiday, something like this happened for the first time in our country.

For Russian people, it was like a bolt from the blue.

Throughout Moscow, an auto-march of all delegations arriving to the festival has moved.

On the streets of the city were two million Muscovites, almost half of the city's population at that time.

To better see what is happening, people climbed on the roofs of stalls, on lampposts, on the roofs of houses.

At the corner of Sretenka and Garden Ring, on the Kolkhoznaya Square a few minutes before the direct radio report about the opening of the festival under the weight of enthusiastic spectators, the building of the Shcherbakovsky department store collapsed.

As the days of the festival passed in Moscow, eyewitnesses of the events recall: journalists Yuri Fokin and Vladlen Krivosheev, the chairman of the festival Sergey Romanovsky, Poet Valentin Berestov, 2 nd Secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol in 1957, Vladimir Semichastny, firefighter Leonid Isaev and former schoolgirls Zinaida Kudryavtseva and Valentina Astapova.

The program includes footage of the chronicle: the opening of the festival, the breeding of pigeons, fragments of speeches by Bertis Reading and Edita Pyekhi, walks of foreigners in Moscow.