Red Room (comics)

Red Room
Interior of the Red Room Art by David López
Notable locations	Russia
Notable characters	Natalia Romanova Yelena Belova Winter Soldier
First appearance	Black Widow vol. 1 #2
Publisher	Marvel Comics

The Red Room is a fictional Soviet training facility in Marvel Comics that was created to train highly specialized spies, including Black Widows Natalia Romanova and Yelena Belova.

In the Marvel Universe, The Red Room (Красная комната) is one of the K.G.B.'s espionage training programs. For decades the Red Room had been a Cold War facility to train female spies known as Black Widows. The Red Room wasn't only a training facility, but, in certain stories, employs biochemical enhancements for its agents and also implants them with false memories reminiscent of those used by the Weapon Plus Program.

In the work of Richard K. Morgan, the Red Room recruits 28 orphan girls to raise them to become undetectable deep-cover agents to infiltrate China and the West. The core methodology was designed by Professor Grigor Chelintsov, a leader in the field of psychotechnics, and which imprints people with completely fabricated memories. These girls are made to believe that they were trained in ballet at the Bolshoi Theatre. During her training, Natalia Romanova was contacted by The Enchantress, who manipulated her just to suggest that Romanova may be freed, only to prevent her from escaping - however, Romanova's effort attracted attention of the Red Room's organizers, who would have otherwise "discarded" Romanova. Natasha was paired with handler Ivan Petrovitch. Furthermore, the girls all received a special treatment designed by biochemist Lyudmila Kudrin. The Kudrin treatment allows women to appear young for many decades, as well as healthy and resilient at superhuman levels.

Niko Constantin was the only male trainee of the Red Room's male equivalent of the Black Widow Ops program dubbed "Wolf Spider". Niko proved to be an effective killer, but impossible to handle or control, leading to the program to be declared a failure. Years later, he was found to be imprisoned in a Russian gulag, leading a gang of convicts dubbed the Wolf Spiders, and holding a grudge against Bucky Barnes, one of the trainers for the Wolf Spider program.