Interfax
Russian news agency
Interfax (Russian: Интерфакс) is a Russian news agency. The agency is owned by Interfax News Agency joint-stock company and is headquartered in Moscow.
History
As the first non-governmental channel of political and economic information about the USSR, Interfax was formed in September 1989, during Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost period, by Mikhail Komissar and his colleagues from international broadcasting station 'Radio Moscow', a part of Soviet Gosteleradio system. Interfax originally used fax machines for text transmission, hence the company name.
By 1990, Interfax had 100 subscribers and the agency quickly began to attract the attention of conservatives within the government, who attempted to shut down the agency. This saw the agency gain prominence in major western media, a position strengthened by its coverage of the 1991 August Putsch and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Interfax continued to expand in the 1990s, adding subsidiary agencies for financial, metallurgical, oil and gas markets, information products on agriculture, business law, transport, telecommunications, and the market data terminal 'EFiR information system' for stock market players to its general news coverage. Interfax also opened subsidiaries across the post-Soviet states, first in Ukraine (1992), Belarus (1993) and Kazakhstan (1996), and later in Azerbaijan (2002), during this time bringing the number of local offices across the regions of Russian Federation to 50.
To promote its information products abroad, Interfax opened its first company outside the former USSR in 1991, when 'Interfax America' was opened in Denver, CO. This was followed by the opening of London-based 'Interfax Europe Ltd.' (1992), 'Interfax Germany GmbH', based in Frankfurt (1993), and the 'Interfax News Service Ltd.' in Hong Kong (1998).
In 2004, Interfax created the 'SPARK system' designed to check business agents in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, Interfax also launched media monitoring services through its 'SCAN system'.
“Interfax” enters the record as russian news agency. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Interfax, Russian and news can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Interfax” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Interfax, Russian and news provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q379271. VIAF identifies the subject as 143819520. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1989, 1990, 1991 and 1992.
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This entry incorporates text from “Interfax” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.