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When Reagan visited Moscow for the fourth summit in 1988, he was viewed as a celebrity by the Soviets. A journalist asked the president if he still considered the Soviet Union the evil empire. "No," he replied, "I was talking about another time, another era."<ref>{{Cite news|last=Talbott|first=Strobe|work=[[Time (magazine)|Time]]|date=August 5, 1991|url=http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,973554-5,00.html|title=The Summit Goodfellas|accessdate=January 26, 2008}}</ref> At Gorbachev's request, Reagan gave a speech on free markets at the [[Moscow State University]].<ref>Reagan (1990), p. 713.</ref>
====Honoring German war dead at Bitburg, Germany====
{{Main|Bitburg controversy}}
Reagan came under much criticism in 1985 when he was accused of honoring Nazi war criminals at a cemetery in West Germany.<ref>Richard J. Jensen, ''Reagan at Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg'' (Texas A&M University Press, 2007).</ref> In February 1985, the administration accepted an invitation for Reagan to visit a German military cemetery in [[Bitburg]] and to place a wreath alongside West German Chancellor [[Helmut Kohl]]. Deaver was given assurances by a German head of protocol that no war criminals were buried there. It was later determined that the cemetery held the graves of 49 members of the [[Waffen-SS]]. What neither Deaver nor other administration officials initially realized was that many Germans distinguished the regular SS, who typically were composed of Nazi true believers, and the Waffen-SS which were attached to military units and composed of conscripted soldiers.<ref name="President Reagan, Lou Cannon book, 1985 Bitburg visit">Cannon (1991, 2000) [https://archive.org/details/presidentreagan000cann/page/508 <!-- quote="Neither Reagan nor Deaver nor anyone else in the White House involved with the president's participation in the Bitburg ceremony realized that many Germans distinguished ". --> pp. 507-08].</ref>
As the controversy brewed in April 1985, Reagan issued a statement that called the Nazi soldiers buried in that cemetery as themselves "victims," a designation which ignited a stir over whether Reagan had equated the SS men to victims of [[the Holocaust]].<ref>[https://articles.latimes.com/1985-04-19/news/mn-14900_1_concentration-camp Reagan Defends Cemetery Visit : Says German Dead Are Also Victims of Nazis], ''Los Angeles Times'', Don Shannon, April 19, 1985.</ref> [[Pat Buchanan]], Reagan's Director of Communications, argued that the president did not equate the SS members with the actual Holocaust, but as victims of the ideology of Nazism.<ref>{{cite web|author=Buchanan, Pat|authorlink =Pat Buchanan|url=http://www.buchanan.org/pma-99-1105-wallstjl.html|title=Pat Buchanan's Response to Norman Podhoretz's OP-ED|publisher=The Internet Brigade|year=1999|accessdate=September 3, 2007|archiveurl =https://web.archive.org/web/20070927193354/http://www.buchanan.org/pma-99-1105-wallstjl.html|archivedate =September 27, 2007|url-status=dead}}</ref> Now strongly urged to cancel the visit,<ref>Reeves, p. 249</ref> the president responded that it would be wrong to back down on a promise he had made to Chancellor Kohl. On May 5, 1985, President Reagan and Chancellor Kohl first visited the site of the former Nazi Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and then the Bitburg cemetery where, along with two military generals, they did place a wreath.<ref>[https://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/06/international/europe/06REAG.html?pagewanted=all Reagan Joins Kohl in Brief Memorial at Bitburg Graves], ''New York Times'', Bernard Weinraub, May 6, 1985,</ref><ref>Reeves, p. 255</ref>
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