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.

While research on conspiracy theories has rapidly expanded in recent years, it remains methodologically narrow in psychology. Most studies rely on self-administered questionnaires that treat survey responses as stable indicators of belief (“x% believe in conspiracy y”), implicitly assuming that such beliefs are stable individual dispositions, detached from social and historical context. This paper challenges that assumption by approaching conspiracy beliefs within context-dependent communicative practices. Drawing on a mixed-methods study of responses to COVID-19, in which participants first completed a questionnaire measuring endorsement of specific conspiracies, followed by interviews inviting them to elaborate on their earlier responses. The comparison between these two contexts of data collect reveals striking divergences that illuminating constraints in the method. Factors shaping these divergences include (1) the shift from written to oral communication; (2) social desirability and the self-reflexive distancing of statements such as “I know this is a conspiracy theory, but…”; (3) the openness of trust-based conversation; (4) differing interpretations of Likert items as hypothetical possibilities versus personal convictions; and (5) the contrast between forced categorical choice and an expression of a range of possible belief in dialogue. Taken together, the findings problematize the conception of “the conspiracy theorist” as a single, monological type. Instead, they invite an understanding of conspiracy belief as relational, being continuously negotiated within specific communicative and societal moments.

We propose a behavioral view of authoritarianism, and argue that the everyday psychology of rules and punishment is at its core. Authoritarianism is often understood at the nation-state level, categorizing particular regimes and practices as authoritarian, or at the individual level, as a set of tendencies or worldviews. We reposition behavior as the main unit of analysis. We specify a set of behaviors made available only when people interact with the state, and use state rules and state punishment to carry out their own desires (e.g., for revenge, dominance) at the expense of the rule of law. Then, we propose that at the heart of these authoritarian behaviors is regular, everyday psychology—the psychology of norms and norm enforcement via third party punishment, albeit formalized, codified, and refracted through state procedures. States solve large scale coordination problems, largely with codified rules and official third- party punishments. Sometimes people use these procedures to fairly and legitimately uphold the rule of law, and sometimes people use them for their own ends, amounting to authoritarianism. We review how the state channels human desires for punishment and rules, and how people can use state punishment and state rules to behave in authoritarian ways; State punishments can be administered selectively and personally. Official rules can be made that keep individuals from public services, or exist only to keep some people in positions of power over others. The psychology of norms and third party punishment, which enables large-scale human cooperation, is at the heart of authoritarianism.