Berlin ? World leaders on Sunday praised former President Reagan as a fervent voice against tyranny whose desire to instill democracy around the globe spurred a movement that helped to bring an end to Soviet-style communism.

But in some countries, reaction to Reagan’s death rekindled animosities, especially in Nicaragua and El Salvador, where the Reagan administration intervened in civil wars that cost thousands of lives and upset the politics of Latin America for years. He was considered by some critics the latest in a series of meddling presidents, an opinion that hardened after the Iran-Contra affair in which the United States secretly sold arms to finance rebels against the leftist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev said he and Reagan “were destined to meet in the most difficult years of the 20th century, when we felt on both sides that we faced the threat of nuclear war.”

“I take the death of Ronald Reagan very hard,” said Gorbachev, whose negotiations with Reagan became enduring images of the 1980s.

Much of the high drama during the 1980s came amid squabbles between Washington and Moscow. Gorbachev recalled how his 1985 summit in Geneva with Reagan turned argumentative from the start.

“After the first round of talks I told my aides he was a true dinosaur, and Reagan told his aides I was a stubborn Bolshevik,” Gorbachev told reporters Sunday at a Moscow think tank he set up in 1992. “However, with one and a half days we made progress, which allowed us to sign an important document” to accelerate negotiations on mutual cuts in nuclear weapons.

Reagan was fondly remembered in Eastern Europe. From the shadow of the Berlin Wall to the anti-communist protests clamoring through the Polish shipbuilding city of Gdansk, Reagan’s speeches two decades ago inspired millions not to abandon their fight against some totalitarian regimes.

“He played a role straight out of a Western,” said Janusz Lewandowski, a member of the Polish Parliament. “His rejection of communism was authentic, it grew out of real values. For him it really was an ‘evil empire’ and he never felt the fascination with communism unlike some other elites in the Western world.”

But the 40th U.S. president was viewed in the Arab world with ambivalence. He is remembered for sending Marines to Lebanon in hopes of dislodging the Palestine Liberation Organization — a mission that ended in carnage when a suicide blast at U.S. barracks in Beirut killed 241 troops, prompting the United States to withdraw.

In Libya, strongman Moammar Gadhafi said he was sorry Reagan died before he could be put on trial for bombing Libya in 1986. Gadhafi’s adopted daughter, along with dozens of others, were reportedly killed in the airstrikes.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said his nation remembered the Reagan administration’s $2 billion in covert aid to the Muslim holy war against Soviet forces, which began in 1979. The secret program had some unintended consequence; the hard-line Taliban regime that later seized control of the country allied itself with the al-Qaida network.