An Unwanted Reprise Riles a Soviet Rocker 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. Mr. Grebenshikov’s Facebook post, and his subsequent dovish public statements, were a departure of sorts for the singer, who has tried since his earliest days as an unauthorized Soviet rock hero to remain detached from politics. Born the year that Stalin died, Mr. Grebenshikov is now a 60-year-old intellectual and student of Buddhism with a smile that, beneath dark glasses and a full beard, runs the gamut from impish to beatific. He came of age in the 1960s and ’70s, during a time that the Russian rock critic Artemy Troitsky called “the maximum boredom” of the Brezhnev era. “There were probably a lot of nice things about the Soviet Union, but for me it was always overshadowed by Big Brother,” said Mr. Grebenshikov, who is known in Russia as B.G. Civic life was highly regulated, and young people like Mr. Grebenshikov, who studied mathematics but later worked as a janitor, chose to take menial jobs that afforded them more free time — out from under the influence of the state authorities, in what Mr. Grebenshikov called a “parallel dimension” — to pursue personal interests like music. Mr. Grebenshikov started Aquarium in 1972 in his native Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, where the band would gather in the kitchens of communal apartments and collect black-market records and magazines to build an encyclopedic knowledge of Western rock culture. Its members included, at various times, a cellist who worked as a security guard and a drummer from a restaurant’s house band. “It was a shadow society,” Mr. Grebenshikov said. “But in Russia it had a peculiar form, in that you could live for months without really encountering that other world. The only places you needed to go were the wine shop and the book shop.” MR. GREBENSHIKOV’S songs were the first to truly combine Russian literary sensibilities and Western rock. “He changed the Russian language, as any great poet did before him,” Alexander Gorbachev, editor in chief of Afisha, a Russian pop-culture magazine, wrote in an email. The band’s complex, multilayered lyrics, which drew on influences ranging from Shakespeare to medieval Chinese poetry to David Bowie, resonated with disaffected young people who were not interested in becoming full-fledged Soviet dissidents. By the mid-1980s, millions of Aquarium’s cassette tapes — mostly copies of recordings of concerts performed in private apartments — were in circulation across the Soviet Union. Still, the underground rock scene was repressed. Mr. Grebenshikov was under surveillance by the K.G.B., and the band members — not recognized as musicians by the state, even when they became famous — could not legally earn money from their music. In the late 1980s, only after Mikhail S. Gorbachev came to power, did Melodiya, the state-run record company, release an official Aquarium album. “The situation was absolutely horrible. Then it all changed suddenly, and our enemies started to put out our records and write wonderful things about us in the newspaper,” Mr. Grebenshikov recalled. “It was the same people who had been denouncing us the day before. We were so happy, we didn’t ask for any money. We had won — we thought.” Evgenii Bershtein, a professor of Russian at Reed College in Oregon, said the Melodiya record was a landmark moment for him. “I remember walking home in the snow with the LP in my hands and with tears running down my eyes,” Mr. Bershtein, then a college student in Leningrad, said. “In my emotional memory, Aquarium’s coming out from the underground marks a very powerful moment in Russia’s move toward increased liberty.” Today, lines from Mr. Grebenshikov’s songs (“Rock ’n’ roll is dead, but we aren’t, yet”) are part of the country’s vernacular, and Mr. Grebenshikov, the former outsider, has been embraced by the Russian establishment. In 2003, the Kremlin awarded Mr. Grebenshikov the Order for Merit to the Fatherland. “I took it for my mother,” he said of the honor. Mr. Troitsky, the rock critic, said he found Mr. Grebenshikov’s ties to the administration of President Vladimir V. Putin disappointing. He is well received by “Putin officialdom,” Mr. Troitsky said. “In my opinion, it is rather sad.” OTHERS see Mr. Grebenshikov’s public image differently. “He never openly criticizes the government, but he never openly endorses it as well,” wrote Mr. Gorbachev, the editor. In 2013, Mr. Grebenshikov released two critically acclaimed songs: “The Governor,” about a politician who wears designer shirts and has a hand in the deaths of journalists, and “The Harvest Festival in the Palace of Labor,” which some see as a psychogram of a country primed to return to Soviet ways. As the crisis in Ukraine escalated earlier this year, he released several new songs online, including a passionate lament called “Love in the Time of War.” Boris Barabanov, a music critic at Kommersant Publishing House, said these songs were more important than Mr. Grebenshikov’s other public statements. “He is a much better songwriter than a speaker,” he said. “It’s not critical,” Mr. Barabanov said of Mr. Grebenshikov’s music. “It’s poetry. He’s making a picture of events.” Mr. Grebenshikov, who is preparing for a tour through the remote Ural Mountains in Western Russia, said he wrote “Love in the Time of War” before the current crisis began. “This is the magic of good songs,” he said in an email. “Sometimes they reflect what is about to happen.” Sally McGrane https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/26/world/europe/for-leader-of-soviet-rock-band-an-unwanted-appropriation.html