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.