Russia fires veteran journalist Mikhail Gusman from senior TASS post

Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has signed a decree officially relieving Mikhail Gusman of his position as First Deputy Director General of the Information Telegraph Agency of Russia (ITAR-TASS), marking the end of a nearly 30-year tenure at one of the country's leading news agencies.

The decree, made public on July 25, states: “To relieve Mikhail Solomonovich Gusman of his position as First Deputy Director General of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise ‘Information Telegraph Agency of Russia (ITAR-TASS)’,” Caliber.Az reports.

Gusman, 75, has been a prominent figure in Russian journalism for decades. He joined TASS in the mid-1990s and steadily rose through the ranks to become one of its top executives. Since 2000, he has also served as the author and host of the long-running political television series Formula of Power, in which he has interviewed dozens of world leaders and public figures.

Throughout his career, Gusman has received several state honours, including the title of Honoured Cultural Worker of the Russian Federation in 2001 and Honoured Journalist of the Russian Federation in 2018.

TASS, officially known as the Information Telegraph Agency of Russia, is the country’s largest state-owned news agency and one of the oldest in the world. Founded in 1904 during the Russian Empire as the St. Petersburg Telegraph Agency, it became the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) in 1925, serving as the official news outlet of the USSR for decades.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the agency was restructured and renamed the Russian Information Agency (RIA) and later reverted to the acronym TASS in 2014, while formally retaining the historic full name.

By Vugar Khalilov