The article is devoted to the study of the formation, operation and development of the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) as an instrument of domestic information policy in the 20th century. Key stages in the agency's development from its inception to its transformation into a major media resource of the USSR and modern Russia are studied. Special attention is given to how TASS shaped the image of the country through various formats, as well as integration into the global media system. Throughout its history, the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union has demonstrated its ability to adapt to political and technological changes, communicating the position of official Moscow to the foreign public and generally fulfilling the role of the most important domestic instrument of foreign information policy. In the domestic arena, TASS covered key moments of Russian history, had a monopoly on the dissemination of information, combining centralized management with the flexibility of information formats. The methodological basis of the research is the principle of historicism and scientific objectivity, a systematic approach, methods of analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction, observation. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that for the first time in Russian historiography, a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union has been carried out, and the continuous development from the creation of the agency's prototype to the current state has been traced. TASS has been studied as a tool for influencing a foreign audience in order to form a positive image of the Soviet state. The main aspects and practices of TASS's work were reviewed, as well as key events that influenced the changes in its activities were identified. TASS played a particularly significant role during important and crisis periods of Russian history, as well as successfully adapting to new geopolitical realities. TASS appears to be a unique and flexible institution that was an important instrument in the foreign information policy of the USSR and continues to be so in the Russian Federation.
Sedova et al. (Fri,) studied this question.