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The 'voice' of Prague Spring recalls '68 broken hopes

14.04.2008

PRAGUE (AFP) - Prague Spring, one of the defining moments in the global tumult of 1968, was embodied by the voice of a woman before Soviet tanks crushed this brief interlude and silenced Marta Kubisova for the next 19 years.

"The Spring was like a gushing forth of energy that had long been smothered: with the abolition of censorship a new wind blew everywhere," the Czech singer, now 65, recalls.

The star even said "no" to extending a lucrative contract at a top Paris music hall, so strong was the draw to be part of the effusion back home.

Once there, her tunes, especially the immensely popular "Prayer for Marta", became the signature songs for the massive explosion of hope and freedom in then Czechoslovakia until the Soviet masters wrested back control.

With the country back in the grip of loyal communist leaders who followed Moscow's line, the powerful song was banned and Kubisova silenced -- until the regime was toppled in 1989.

Forty years on, Kubisova is still a partisan of the late and affable Alexander Dubcek. After taking over as head of the Czechoslovak communist party in January 1968, he tried to push through a new type of communism: "socialism with a human face."

As the '68 winds of change swept around the globe, Dubcek himself led -- though sometimes seemed pushed into by rising popular demand -- a series of reforms that proved too much for the Kremlin, which suppressed them with brutal force three months later, in August.

"The arrival of Dubcek, it was like that of (Mikhail) Gorbachev 20 years later. You can see it as a last attempt to rehabilitate a certain idea before it lost its meaning altogether," Kubisova said, referring to the last Soviet president and architect of Soviet perestroika.

At the time, she even recorded a song specially dedicated to Dubcek: "You Are Not Alone in Hoping."

When censorship effectively ended soon after Dubcek took power, a wide-ranging debate touching all sections of the population unfolded. It focussed on everything from Stalinist-era crimes of the communist party after it seized power in 1948, to the state of the economy and arts and culture.

Dubcek prepared an ill-fated programme of political and economic reforms for which he hoped to win party support at a special congress in September 1968.

"At that time, people, especially the young, had the impression that they had to take a new turn, do something new after the horrible years of the 1950's when fear was omnipresent," the singer remembers.

-- 'We could feel the string links which united us' --

Already a star, Kubisova got a taste of the student revolt hitting the West during a four-week stint with other Czech artists at the Olympia theatre in the French capital -- sharing the same venue with the legendary Josephine Baker.

"We had an astounding success, people cried 'victory' at us, we could feel the strong links which united us," she said.

The famed French impresario and Olympia owner "Bruno Coquatrix offered me a new contract but I preferred to get back to Prague; in the streets there was the same atmosphere of freedom and change as in Paris. But those who warned that we should not trust the Soviets were unfortunately right," she recalled.

She offered a lucky charm, a small angel, to Dubcek, but stronger forces were at work. On the night of August 20, hopes of a new democratic turn in the Soviet bloc were muffled by another tune -- the rumble of tank tracks as Warsaw Pact forces crossed Czechoslovak borders and ploughed into Prague.

"At three in the morning, my mother burst into my room and cried, 'Marta, get up, the country is occupied!'.

"Half asleep, I asked myself, 'What is the matter with her. It cannot be all that bad if the Americans come. I never thought that the Russians could occupy us," she said.

Kubisova reacted by recording her masterpiece, "Prayer for Marta," an allegorical call for peace for a people who could once again be masters of their own destiny.

After Dubcek's fall from power, she refused to toe the line of the new pro-Leonid Brezhnev regime headed by Gustav Husak and was punished. The authorities banned her from performing, forcing her first to become a worker then later a secretary for the next two decades.

She soon had a daughter, Katia, joined the dissident movement and "Charter 77", a group demanding the regime respect basic human rights and headed by dissident playwright Vaclav Havel -- later to become the country's first post-communist president.

Further punishment followed. "The police knew that Katia's primary school closed at five, so they systematically called me in at three or four for questioning."

Today she says she harbours no bitterness, though she could not sing publicly again until the November 1986 "Velvet Revolution". Kubisova revived her anthem for the crushed movement 21 years earlier, the words taking on new significance with the onset of democracy for a people who could now forge their own future.

Source: http://au.news.yahoo.com/080414/19/16gr9.html

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