The activities of TASS foreign branches (1925–1939)

The subject of this research article is the activities of the foreign correspondent departments (correspondent offices) of the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) from 1925 to 1939. The focus is on the organizational structure of the foreign bureaus, the mechanisms of their interaction with the central apparatus in Moscow, with Soviet diplomatic representations, and with leading foreign news agencies: the British Reuters, the American Associated Press and United Press, and the German Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau. A special emphasis is placed on analyzing the dual nature of TASS's activities abroad – both as a professional news agency and as a tool of Soviet foreign policy and ideological strategy in the context of the transformation of the international information system, the growing political instability in Europe, and the tightening of centralized party-state control over Soviet information institutions during the interwar period. The study is based on a combination of historical principles and comparative-historical methods; the source base consists of archival materials from the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF, f. 4459), including organizational correspondence, financial reports, and analytical reviews of the foreign press, which are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. The scientific novelty of the work is primarily defined by the introduction of previously unused archival sources, allowing for the reconstruction of the actual operational practices of TASS foreign departments. For the first time, a systematic comparative analysis is conducted of three key areas of the agency's activities: British, German, and American, in their interconnection with the dynamics of bilateral political relations. It is shown that TASS's integration into the international news agency system was pragmatic: Western partners interacted with the Soviet agency to gain access to information from the USSR. Institutional contradictions between correspondent offices, the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, diplomatic missions, and the Comintern are identified, as well as the evolution from relative operational independence of the foreign bureaus in the 1920s to their strict centralization by the end of the 1930s.