Theory Russia has banned microwave ovens is cooked

AAP FACTCHECK – A former NSW upper house candidate has promoted a longstanding urban myth that microwave ovens are banned in Russia for safety reasons. 

This is false. The claim can be traced back to at least the 1990s but has no basis in fact. 

Microwave ovens are freely available to buy from Russian electronics retailers and Russian consumers bought more than two million of the devices in 2023.

Russia’s microwave oven market is expected to reach almost three million units by 2029. 

The claim was made in a Facebook video by David Graham, an activist and social media content creator who goes by the nickname “Guru”.

Mr Graham stood as an ungrouped candidate in NSW’s 2023 state election, picking up  31 first preference votes.

AAP FactCheck has previously debunked other false claims made by Mr Graham, including baseless theories that Australia stopped printing bank notes in 2018 and that skin cancer didn’t exist before sunscreen.

“Guys… you know it’s illegal to have microwaves in your house in Russia,” Mr Graham says in the video (11 minutes, 47 seconds). 

“Seriously, Putin’s a big nasty guy but … you’re not allowed to have microwaves. They don’t care about microwaves over here, do they?”

It is unclear from the video why Mr Graham believes microwaves are banned in Russia or what he meant by his comment that “they don’t care about microwaves over here”.

However, previous discredited theories about Russia banning microwaves have cited health concerns linked to electromagnetic radiation.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, the non-ionizing radiation used by a microwave does not make food radioactive. 

Mr Graham did not respond to an AAP FactCheck message asking for the basis of his claim.

Similar claims about microwave ovens being banned in Russia date back at least 25 years. 

In 2017 Snopes traced the origins of the myth back to a 1998 article in the Journal Natural Science, which claimed “the use of any such microwave apparatus was forbidden in 1976 by Soviet state law” (page 43).

The journal article does not provide any sources or references for the statement.

The author of the article is William P. Kopp from Portland, Oregon, USA. 

An author biography at the end of the article says Mr Kopp worked at the “Atlantis Rising Educational Center in Portland, Oregon” from 1977 to 1979, where he “gathered all documents known so far concerning the scientific proofs about microwaves’ harmful effects on humans”. 

“By doing this he got in the way of a powerful lobby and was forced later on to even change his name and to disappear,” the biography says. 

Mr Kopp’s claim has since been repeated in other publications, including a May 2010 article by US osteopath Dr Joseph Mercola and a 2016  article on a website called Natural News – though both of those articles also claim the microwave ban was later lifted by Russian authorities.

A 2023 TechInsider article by Russian-Belorussian journalist Tim Skorenko described the claimed Soviet-era microwave ban as a “legend”.

Mr Skorenko wrote that the devices began production in the USSR in the late 1970s, albeit “in very small batches” and “for a lot of money.” 

The notion that microwave ovens are currently banned in Russia is easily disproved by looking at the websites of electronics retailers in the country. 

M.Video, a major electronics retailer with stores across Russia, lists hundreds of different types of microwaves for sale online. 

Rival Russian retailers Wildberries and DNS similarly list numerous microwave ovens for sale.

 According to a September 6 article in the Russian daily business newspaper Vedemosti, Russians bought more than two million microwaves in the first half of 2024.

Russian consumers spent some $US315.4 million ($A504.5 million) on the devices in 2024, according to the German data-gathering platform Statista.

It is also clear that many Russians have microwaves in their homes.

A YouTube search for the Russian-language phrase which  translates as “microwave at home” returns hundreds of videos of Russians reviewing domestic microwave ovens or cooking food in the devices.

One of the videos shows food blogger Masha Fom – who has more than one million YouTube subscribers and list her location as “Russia”- attempting to make pizza in a cup using a microwave oven.

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