the regime or discussing issues that were deemed not safe. e. Maciej Gdula summarized Solidarity's demise and its subsequent mythologizing as follows: "Solidarity was put in a golden sarcophagus and turned into a myth, which was supposed to legitimize the change of 1989. But the movement at that time was dead: it was falling apart already in 1981 and it was finished off by the martial law. However, it was precisely this external termination that opened the possibility of its rebirth as a myth." "...the new order was legitimized to a great extent by the myth of Solidarity. The time between the martial law and the Round Table had to be compressed to make an impression of continuity. There was a moment of lapse, the story went, but then society woke up again and reclaimed power." f. The Balcerowicz Plan enjoyed a consensus of opinion of Polish legislators, who supported it across the political spectrum, together with President Jaruzelski. However, Michael Bruno, chief of advisers of the International Monetary Fund, was surprised when Mazowiecki's government chose the harshest of the transformation plans presented by the fund. Jane Hardy argued that "a particularly pernicious ideologically reactionary variant of neoliberalism" had been produced in Poland. Czechoslovakia and Hungary did not opt for a radical liberal changeover and their systemic conversions resulted in lower than in Poland levels of social inequalities. According to the economist Zdzisław Sadowski, the Poles were generally euphoric about the end of the era of communist rule and Soviet domination. Because of the belief that the Balcerowicz Plan would quickly result in universal Western-like prosperity, the plan enjoyed broad social support, which would cause any conceivable competing pursuits of more moderate economic policies to be politically unrealistic. According to Rafał Woś, "...Poland was a peripheral country, it moved from one relationship of dependence to another, was in a very weak position. The international financial institutions treated our elites like children, not partners. ... But even then, there was some room for maneuver." g. Among the critics of the prevailing right wing ideology and practice of the Polish transformation were Karol Modzelewski and Tadeusz Kowalik. Other "prescient voices" listed by David Ost were Ryszard Bugaj, Barbara Labuda, Włodzimierz Pankow and Józef Pinior. The Solidarity Working Group, led by Andrzej Gwiazda, Marian Jurczyk and Jan Rulewski, was opposed in 1989 to the course adopted by the PZPR-Solidarity negotiators. h. Employee councils