In the late 1960s, every country had at least one: a cute singer/actress, mid-20s, go-go boots, hair piled high, black eyeliner, radiating youthful independence. The main difference with Czechoslovakia's leading prototype, Marta Kubišová, is that her government soon banished her entirely from public life.
Kubišová was the "it" girl of the Prague Spring, that snowballing 1964–1968 cultural and eventually political thaw of communist frigidity, eventually stomped out in August 1968 by the invading Warsaw Pact. Overnight, Kubišová's sorrowful ballad "Modlitba pro Martu" ("A Prayer for Marta") was transformed from sappy tear-jerker to theme song of the resistance.
