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De Blasio visited Communist USSR in college

Hope those Ukraine girls really knocked him out.

Bill de Blasio toured parts of the communist Soviet Union as the Cold War raged, The Post has learned.

The Democratic mayoral candidate — who is enjoying a huge lead over Republican Joe Lhota coming into Tuesday’s election — was “back in the USSR” in 1983 while a student at NYU.

It was the same year that President Ronald Reagan referred to the country’s regime as “The Evil Empire.”

De Blasio’s trip also occurred five years before he went to Nicaragua in support of the Marxist Sandinista regime there to distribute food and medicine during its civil war. At the time, the US government opposed the Sandinistas, which had received weapons from the Soviets and supplies from Cuba.

The trips show de Blasio’s fascination as a young man with the workings of leftist and communist countries. He also honeymooned in Cuba.

While de Blasio has discussed and defended his work in Nicaragua, he has said nary a word about going behind the Iron Curtain.

De Blasio listed the trip on a résumé from the 1990s. Under “travel,” he said he visited “West Africa, Europe, Israel, Puerto Rico, USSR.”

A de Blasio campaign spokeswoman confirmed that her boss went to the United Soviet Socialist Republic as a student in 1983.

“When he was a presidential scholar at NYU, Bill attended an annual trip that took him to Lithuania and Russia. In other years, he traveled — along with other presidential scholars — to Spain, Israel and Senegal,” said de Blasio spokeswoman Lis Smith.

“He went in 1983, when they were still a part of the USSR.”

The de Blasio campaign declined to comment further when asked why he went on the trip or what he learned from it.

The campaign referred other questions to NYU about who paid for and arranged the trips.

An NYU spokesman had no immediate comment.

De Blasio’s trip to the USSR came amid frayed relations between the United States and the Soviets near the Cold War’s end.

In 1980, at the behest of President Jimmy Carter, the United States boycotted the Summer Olympics in Moscow to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the year prior. Carter also suspended wheat shipments to the USSR.

Carter curbed US exchange programs with the Soviets, too.

In retaliation, the USSR boycotted the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

In the same year de Blasio toured the USSR, Reagan gave his famous “Evil Empire” speech. He particularly blasted Americans seeking a reduction in nuclear arms.

The Soviets “preach the supremacy of the state, dictate its omnipotence over individual man and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth. They are the focus of evil in the modern world,” Reagan said in his March 8, 1983, speech to the National Association of Evangelicals.

“So, in your discussions of the nuclear-freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”

De Blasio has been involved with anti-nuke groups, including being an organizer for the Physicians for Social Responsibility.

It wasn’t until the late 1980s that relations thawed between the United States and Soviet Union during Reagan’s second term and after Mikhail Gorbachev was elected the Soviet premier.

In 1986, the United States and USSR announced an agreement increasing cultural, scientific and educational exchange programs. And they cut a historic deal to scale back their nukes.

A few years later, the Soviet Union collapsed, bringing long-awaited freedoms to Russia and many Eastern Bloc countries.