Vladimir Putin can't be serious. He says in a recent speech that:
"Regarding the problematic pages in our history, yes, we do have them, as does any state."
"But other countries have also known their bleak and terrible moments."
"In any event, we never used nuclear weapons against civilians, and we never dumped chemicals on thousands of kilometres of land or dropped more bombs on a tiny country than were dropped during the entire Second World War, as was the case in Vietnam."
"Problematic"? Is that we he calls the deliberate starvation of 15 million Ukranians by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s? It's true the Soviets never dropped an atomic bomb (though they certainly threatened to do so often enough), but the U.S. nuclear attacks on the Japanese, who had initiated war with us in 1941, took some 200,000 lives. Uncle Joe killed that many of his own countrymen on an average afternoon in the 1930s.
As for dropping bombs on tiny countries, the Soviets didn't refrain from bombing people out of some moral scruple. They didn't bomb because they didn't have to. They destroyed the souls and lives of two generations of East Germans, Czechs, Poles, and Hungarians with their armored infantry forces in the fifties and sixties.
Moreover, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of political and religious dissidents languished and perished in the Soviet gulag during the thirties, forties, and fifties.
The Soviets were also responsible for the spread of communism throughout much of Europe and Africa in the fifties, sixties, and seventies resulting in the deaths of millions more.
In all, almost 100 million people perished in the 20th century at the hands of Soviet or Soviet-supported communists and countless other lives were strangled by their oppressive totalitarianism. Some 20 million of those deaths occured within the Soviet Union itself.
I guess that's a "problematic" history, but it's certainly not a history which should be compared favorably with that of the United States.
RLC
