Using the RLMS data, the article examines fear of unemployment among Rus sian workers under different economic and labour market conditions over last 15 years. We employ two alternative measures for this fear. The first one looks at the fear of losing current job, while the second deals with the fear of not finding a relevant re-employment in case of displacement. In order to get the best possible measurement of unemployment for those local and social environments where our respondents liveand work, we design unemployment rates for narrowly defined regional and demographic groups. Estimating ordered probit models for the both fear measures, and controlling for various workers and jobs characteristics, we do not find significant causal effects of unemployment on these fears in most of our specifications. These results are robust to exclusion of potentially endogenous variables, and hold regardless of variation in levels of job security. Moreover, our simulations show that even large increase in the rate of unemployment has little impact on conditional probabilities of expressing strong /weak fear of unemployment. Our findings allow to suggest that the high level and persistence of these fears can be explained by non-economic factors.