This article examines the rise of conspiratorial thinking in wartime Russia as a response to a deeper collective anxiety – not merely the replacement of people, but the erasure of narrative agency. While the Russian version of the ‘Great Replacement’ echoes familiar Western themes such as elite betrayal, cultural erosion, and demographic decline, its central concern shifts towards symbolic displacement. Drawing on Mark Sedgwick’s interpretation of the Great Replacement as a stable narrative structure and J.V. Wertsch’s concept of narrative as a cultural tool, this article argues that conspiracy operates here as a means of reclaiming authorship in a national story whose core meanings have grown unstable. The analysis draws on social media discourse, pro-war commentary, volunteer statements, and nationalist media, showing how anxieties are shaped through emotionally resonant storylines of betrayal and erasure. Yet the reassertion of control paradoxically intensifies fragmentation, turning the Great Replacement into a narrative of narrative disappearance – where the gravest loss is not demographic, but symbolic.

Anxiety about nuclear war emerged after the 1945 atomic bombings of Japan and has risen and fallen over the following decades. It is grounded in future thinking shaped by narrative form and function in policy discussions and especially in film and television. These media have repeatedly drawn on three basic narrative templates organised around three different endings: destruction, judgement, and renewal; human extinction; and permanent and irreversible societal collapse. Several film and television productions are used to illustrate the internal organisation of these narrative templates and to examine how both nuclear fear and nuclear anxiety are involved.