The Red Room gave an orphaned girl the deadly skills that turned her into the Black Widow,
and it took one of America's most patriotic heroes and brainwashed him into becoming the
lethal Winter Soldier.
For the twisted history of the Red Room, though, those two characters are only the beginning.
In the continuity of the comics, the Red Room dates back to at least World War II.
Here in the real world, though, the Red Room didn't make its first appearance until the
late ‘90s, which is pretty surprising when you consider that Black Widow, its most famous
student, had been a major character in the Avengers for about 30 years at that point.
Before "Shadows & Light #1" hit the shelves with a story that expanded on Natasha's true
past, Black Widow's origin was relatively simple, at least by comic book standards.
Before she was a superhero, she was a supervillain — she fought Iron Man back in her first
appearance — and before that, she was just Natalia Romanova (aka Natasha Romanoff), the
star ballerina in the world-famous Bolshoi Ballet and married to a military pilot named
Alexi Shostakov.
When Alexi died in the line of duty, Natalia signed up with the KGB, using her finely honed
physical skills and a knack for martial arts to train as an assassin.
She took the name Black Widow because she somehow knew that Americans were terrified
of spiders, and because, you know, she was literally a widow.
Except that she wasn't.
For one thing, Alexi had never actually died.
The KGB had faked his death to turn him into the Red Guardian, the Soviet counterpart of
Captain America.
That made things pretty awkward the first time he was reunited with his wife, a not-so-happy
event that came when he fought both Black Widow and her new boyfriend, Hawkeye.
Another misleading thing about Black Widow's original backstory is that it later turned
out that Natalia had never actually been a ballerina.
Those were false memories implanted during her training, leaving us with a pretty compelling
question: If that wasn't actually Black Widow's origin, what was?
One of the more interesting pieces of the Red Room puzzle came in Uncanny X-Men #268.
The story is a team-up starring Wolverine that takes place in two different eras.
One half of the story happens in the present day of 1990, when Wolverine and Black Widow
team up to take on the evil ninjas of the Hand, who are stirring up trouble in Madripoor.
The second half of the story takes place 49 years earlier, in 1941, when Wolvie teams
up with Captain America to, well, also fight the Hand.
Back then, however, there was one more wrinkle to the story.
The trouble being stirred up was in the form of a young girl that was kidnapped from Moscow
by Baron Strucker.
Her name?
Natalia Romanova, the girl who would grow up to be the Black Widow.
If you've been paying attention to the dates, you might've already caught on to a pretty
notable quirk to this story.
The Widow was a young girl — somewhere around ten years old judging by the art — in 1941,
and she was still out there fighting bad guys as an Avenger 50 years later, looking like
she was maybe in her early 30s at most.
That's not all that unusual in the Marvel Universe, but unlike the characters with whom
she shared that story, the Widow doesn't have a mutant healing factor, and she didn't spend
years frozen in a block of ice to explain the apparent discrepancy.
Dancers tend to age pretty gracefully, but there was clearly something more going on
with her backstory to explain her lasting youth.
Unlike most of Marvel's main characters, Black Widow doesn't actually have a definitive,
set-in-stone origin story.
That's especially odd when you consider that they literally published a comic called Black
Widow: Deadly Origin back in 2010.
She's maintained an air of mystery for over 50 years, largely because her training involved
the Red Room altering her memories to suit their own sinister purposes.
The facts go a little something like this.
In 1928, baby Natalia was rescued from a burning building in Stalingrad by Ivan Petrovich.
Ivan was told by Natalia's previous caretaker that li'l Natalia was "a Romanoff," a name
which naturally hinted at a possible connection to Russia's lost royal family, who were seemingly
all executed ten years prior in the Russian Revolution.
That connection, however, would never be fully explored.
Instead, despite Ivan's protests, Natalia was declared an orphan in 1940, and on the
order of Joseph Stalin himself, sent to a new training facility where she proved to
be so adept at learning to kill that the Hand tried to steal her away and Wolverine had
to get involved.
The weird thing is, despite his well-chronicled tendency to adopt young women as a surrogate
father figure, he left her in the care of the KGB ... along with her 27 "sisters."
While she would become its most successful product, Natalia Romanova was certainly not
the only young girl trained in the deadly arts of assassination by the Red Room and
its masters in the Soviet Union's sinister Department X.
Instead, she was one of 28 "students," aka Widows, all of whom were orphaned girls who
had the falsified memories of being dancers for the Bolshoi Ballet.
The architect of this brainwashing was Department X's leader, Vasily Karpov.
Under his direction, Department X recruited a "psychotechnologist" named Grigor Pchelintsov,
who'd invented the technique of implanting false memories.
Together with a "programmer" known only as "Professor Radchenko," who later defected
to the United States, he implanted the Red Room's students with their false memories,
designed to turn the girls into sleeper agents who could pass undetected in other countries.
Unfortunately, there was a pretty big flaw in the program.
The process itself was torturous, and the results weren't quite as undetectable as they
wanted, especially since the conflicting memories would sometimes try to assert themselves at
the same time, leading to the Widows giving multiple answers to the same question.
The mental modifications weren't the only ones, though.
The Red Room's staff also featured Lyudmila Kudrin, a chemical scientist and geneticist.
Her work resulted in the drug treatments that gave Black Widow her unnaturally long lifespan,
as well as causing a biological response that would prevent the women of the Red Room from
ever giving birth because "we wanted warriors, not mothers."
She also designed a pheromone treatment to keep the trainees docile, programming them
to be unable to attack their superiors should they ever get the urge to rebel.
There was another notable member of the Red Room's faculty, although calling him a member
of the staff is pushing it.
He was another one of Comrade Karpov's pet projects, and he was responsible for putting
Natalia and the others through a vicious round of advanced combat training.
He was a pretty effective teacher, too, although that's to be expected.
After all, he learned to fight from Captain America.
His name, of course, was James Buchanan Barnes, better known at the time as the Winter Soldier.
Karpov was the one who'd fished Bucky out of the ocean after his presumed death in 1945.
Using the same technology that he'd employed to implant false memories into the Black Widows,
he erased Bucky's old patriotic personality and turned him into a mindless, ultra-efficient
killing machine.
While both were under the purview of Department X, the Winter Soldier program and the Red
Room were kept separate, with Bucky's side gig as a combat instructor being their only
real crossover.
There's a reason for that, too.
The Red Room was focused exclusively on women.
Except, of course, for the one time that it wasn't.
For a brief period, the Red Room experimented with a counterpart to the Black Widow program
involving boys.
In keeping with the arachnid naming convention, these agents were code-named "Wolf Spiders,"
and they received similar training and conditioning.
Considering that the Red Room's most prominent graduate wound up defecting to America where
she joined both S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers, it might surprise you to learn that the Wolf
Spider program was apparently even less successful.
The Wolf Spider program only produced a single graduate: Niko Constantin.
Rather than send him on missions, the Russian government simply scrapped the project and
sent Niko to a Siberian gulag where they dumped all of their super-powered problems.
It was there, decades later, that he crossed paths with Bucky, who'd trained him as well.
The exact circumstances of his dismissal were never actually revealed other than Bucky mentioning
that he was "psychotic" after his conditioning, but it was established that unlike the Black
Widows, he never got the chemical treatment that slowed his aging.
One of the most notable other graduates of the Red Room was Yelena Belova.
The big difference this time around, though, was that Yelena didn't go through the mental
conditioning that her predecessor had.
Instead, her fanatical devotion to the cause came naturally.
On paper, her scores exceeded Natasha's, and her training cultivated a talent for spycraft
and assassination, honing her into a living weapon to the point where she was officially
given the "Black Widow" code name.
Needless to say, this brought her into a conflict with her predecessor as she attempted to take
her place permanently.
The irony was not only that Yelena would never be the only Black Widow, but that she wasn't
even the only Yelena Belova.
In an effort to cut through the time-consuming process of rounding up athletic orphans, the
Red Room began embarking on a new tactic — cloning their best operatives and just programming
their brains directly rather than overwriting existing memories.
After discovering the truth about her own origin, a clone of Natasha that had activated
after the genuine article's apparent death began to work against the program.
The Natasha clone began to use the Yelena clones for her own purposes, and in the ultimate
insult, she killed the real Yelena in the process to make things easier.
It even happened off-panel.
One of the more recent graduates of the Red Room is Nadia van Dyne, whose origin story
reveals that if the Red Room couldn't find enough orphans to train, they'd just make
a few of their own.
Nadia is the daughter of Hank Pym — the original Ant-Man — and Maria Trovaya, his
first wife, who was introduced in a flashback all the way back in 1963.
In that story, it was revealed that she'd been kidnapped and killed on their honeymoon,
leaving Hank understandably enraged and heartbroken.
Over 50 years later, it was revealed that Maria's kidnapping was faked, and that she'd
stayed alive long enough to give birth to her daughter, Nadia, who was given to the
Red Room as their latest project.
Nadia had apparently inherited her father's genius, and the Red Room leaned into that.
Rather than simply manufacturing a super spy, Nadia's branch of the Red Room was focused
on an attempt to essentially create mad scientists, hoping to control the next generation of minds
brilliant enough to do things like build Iron Man armor or time machines.
To that end, the Red Room's trainers encouraged Nadia by revealing her parentage.
Unfortunately for them, telling Nadia about her famous American superhero father had the
side effect of fueling her desire to escape, which turns out to be pretty easy when you
have access to size-changing Pym Particles and the brains to use them.
After her escape, Nadia was mentored by her stepmother Janet van Dyne, better known as
the Wasp.
Inspired and nurtured for the first time by someone who didn't want to use her brilliance
for world domination, Nadia took both Janet's superheroic identity and her last name for
her own, changing her name Nadia van Dyne and leaping into action as the all-new Wasp.
The dreamy hallucination of Age of Ultron isn't the only time we've seen the Red Room
in the Marvel Cinematic Universe pre-Black Widow, and Natasha Romanoff isn't the only
graduate who's stepped into the spotlight, either.
Decades before Nat took her undercover job as Tony Stark's personal assistant in Iron
Man 2, Agent Peggy Carter crossed paths with the Red Room prototype, Dottie Underwood.
Played by Bridget Regan, Dottie was one of the primary antagonists of Agent Carter, a
spy who infiltrated Peggy's life in order to eventually take her out for the Russian
government.
Even by the standards of the Red Room, the glimpses we see of her training were especially
harsh.
In 1937, a young Dottie killed her only friend in a sparring match, ordered by her trainer
to choke her to death in a promising display of her lethal talents.
Needless to say, Dottie wasn't particularly well-adjusted as an adult, and her fixation
on Peggy was packed with moments that were as full of danger as they were of sapphic
subtext.
"You don't want this visit on the record, which means you're probably going behind someone's
back.
… How naughty."
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