In dark times of war, demographic crisis, and institutional decay, this paper examines the Russian conspiracy narrative of population utilization—a discourse that frames demographic collapse as deliberate depopulation. Borrowed from waste-management jargon, the term recasts citizens as surplus biological material sacrificed by hostile elites.

Research on authoritarianism usually highlights top-down propaganda or democratic resistance. This study instead traces conspiratorial narratives that confront the regime from ultra-authoritarian positions, rejecting reform while demanding harsher repression, purification, and “sovereign restoration.” I argue these stories form a hybrid repertoire of political critique that both contests and mirrors authoritarian ideology.

The corpus spans over 100 sources (2003–2024)—party speeches, para-academic texts, oppositional media—capturing competing conspiratorial framings of population utilization. Three variants emerge:

1. a left-Stalinist narrative of elite betrayal and anti-social policy;

2. a right-wing ethnonationalist version centered on migrant-driven “replacement”;

3. a traditionalist techno-critical narrative targeting urban life and digital modernity.

To explain these competing plots, the paper applies the Narrative Policy Framework (Jones & McBeth 2010; Shanahan et al. 2011, 2013, 2017). Though developed in policy studies, the NPF now travels across ideological conflicts and non-democratic settings (Edenborg 2021; Schlaufer et al. 2022), decomposing stories into characters, sequences, morals, and proposed solutions. Paired with Hajer’s “storylines,” this shows how diverse actors converge on a shared frame yet fight over its meaning.

The analysis reveals how conspiracy narratives operate as instruments of internal radicalization and competition for symbolic power inside authoritarian regimes, functioning simultaneously as critique, contestation, and mechanism of subjectivation.