TASS

TASS, formally the Russian News Agency TASS, is the state-owned news agency of Russia, registered as a federal state unitary enterprise owned by the Russian government and headquartered in Moscow. It began in 1902 as the Commercial Telegraph Agency and from 1904 was known as the Saint Petersburg Telegraph Agency, later becoming the Petrograd Telegraph Agency and then ROSTA after the Bolshevik takeover. In 1925 the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union, or TASS, was created by decree and became the central information agency of the Soviet state, with affiliated agencies in every Soviet republic and restricted digests such as White TASS and Red TASS for officials. After the Soviet collapse it was renamed ITAR-TASS in 1992 and reverted to TASS in 2014. It publishes thousands of items a day in six languages and keeps offices across Russia, the CIS and dozens of other countries.