IN the days before Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula last month, a state-sponsored television network broadcast a bellicose video montage of events in Ukraine set to “This Train’s on Fire,” a song by the celebrated underground Soviet rock band Aquarium. 

This land was ours till we got caught in the fighting. 

It’s time for us to get it back. 

The Kremlin-backed station’s use of the 1980s ballad drew the ire of the band’s founder and lead singer, Boris Grebenshikov. 

“I am touched that you decided to use a piece of my song,” Mr. Grebenshikov wrote in an open letter posted on Facebook. “ But since you are doing it, have the courage to publish it completely, including the words ‘I have seen the generals, they drink and eat our death.’ ” 

The antiwar song, with lyrics inspired by Leo Tolstoy and Bob Dylan, tells the story of a colonel who travels to the front line with his pretty young wife to send his soldiers home after 70 years of fighting a war against themselves.  The ballad became an anthem for perestroika-era Soviets and helped cement Mr. Grebenshikov’s status as one of the most important figures in Russian rock, a genre that has always been less concerned with sex and drugs than with loftier themes, like the search for truth.