Deputatovka by Novaya Gazeta Europe

Every year Russian deputies publish their income declarations. In addition to earnings, MPs and their family members should declare real estate owned or rented (apartments, country houses, garages, and other objects). In Their total area An average Russian city could live on this amount for a whole year. For example, about the same is the average annual budget of Penza or Belgorod cities. MPs and their family members should declare real estate owned or rented in 2020 it was 43 km2. This is also comparable to the area of a small town near Moscow, for example, Sergiev Posad.

This publication came out a few months before the Russian parliamentary elections in September 2021 and became part of Novaya Gazeta's coverage of the State Duma.

Our team collected the comprehensive data set on the assets of Russian deputies by parsing income declarations of State Duma deputies since 2011. We had to combine both Python and Google Sheets functionality to properly clean this data and get correct calculations of all assets owned and used by deputies and their family members. Using regular expressions, we divided and labeled all assets into 8 categories and calculated how the total area of objects of each type changed every year. All of this allowed us to separately consider different types of real estate and land plots.

As a result, we developed interactive visualization, which presents all the wealth of deputies on a cartoonish map of the Deputatovka Luxury Village — the imaginary habitat of Russian officials where all lands and property are assembled together. We created all elements of visualization using Adobe Illustrator and animated them with D3.js.