The state-run media Sunday praised Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin's resistance to the 1938 show trial that led to his conviction and execution and said his confessions were gained by coercion.

Three of the nation's leading daily newspapers published long articles about the work of a Supreme Court commission, which on Thursday cleared Bukharin and 19 codefendants of charges brought against them at the height of Josef Stalin's purges.

The articles in the Communist Party newspaper Pravda, the government paper Izvestia and the Russian Republic newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya added a characterization of the victims and their trial that was missing in the first official reports about the Supreme Court's action.