"He is the one who allowed the breakup of the Soviet Union. May God rest his soul," said Bogdan Chireac, a foreign affairs analyst for the Romanian newspaper Adevarul.
"Mr. Reagan, along with Pope John Paul II, was one of the architects who dismantled communism in eastern Europe and stopped the expansion of the Soviet Union," said Ivo Samson, an analyst with the Slovak Foreign Policy Association.
"For us, Reagan was important because we knew he was really anticommunist, emotionally anticommunist," said Zdenek Kosina, 65, a Czech. "For us, he was a symbol of the United States' genuine determination to bring communism to an end."
Laurentiu Ivan, 35, a customs officer in the Romanian capital, struggled to describe Reagan's legacy and then said: "It is due to him that we are free."