THE history of the Soviet Union had fewer black pages in its history than certain other countries, not least the US, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said in a speech.

"Regarding the problematic pages in our history, yes, we do have them, as does any state,'' Putin said at a social sciences conference, citing Stalin's purges during the 1930s.

"But other countries have also known their bleak and terrible moments,'' he said in comments published on the official Kremlin website.

"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,'' he said.