Red Room

"Brannis told me one of you would be coming." "One of me?" "And I'm not afraid to kill a woman."

- Jerome Zandow and Peggy Carter

The Red Room is a top secret Soviet brainwashing and training program. The program takes young women and turns them into the world's deadliest and most elite assassins.

History
The girls chosen are put through strenuous daily training, including hand to hand combat training, acrobatics, weapons training and tactical skills. Occasionally two girls are chosen to violently spar against each other, weakness is not tolerated and the loser is killed by their opponent.

The girls are forced to watch video projections such as , however the videos are full of subliminal messages including "Instill", "Fear" and "Pain", slowly brainwashing the girls. During sleep all "students" have both their hands handcuffed to the the bed frame preventing escape. In 1937, the girl who would assume the identity of Dottie Underwood was one of the many girls that lived and were trained as elite spies and assassins in the Red Room Academy.

Every morning, one of her instructors entered the room and opened the handcuffs that tied each girl to her bed. One of those mornings, Underwood shared a piece of bread she managed to hide with one of her friends, Anya, whom she later had to fight with as part of their training under the watch of her instructor. Though it looked like an even match at first, Underwood managed to overpower Anya and grabbed her by the neck. With a gesture, her instructor ordered Underwood to kill her friend, and she subsequently broke her neck.

By 1944, Underwood had begun working for the organization known as Leviathan.

Years later, Peggy Carter, Dum Dum Dugan, Junior Juniper and Mike Li infiltrated together the Red Room Academy. There they found a little girl crying in a corner of a room. Dugan approached the girl, Eva, and told her they were there to help and they would not hurt her. Eva stopped crying and slowly touched Dugan's bowler hat, nodding when he asked her if she liked the hat. Dugan asked Carter the reason they were called "bowler hats", and Eva seized the opportunity to quickly stab Dugan, take his gun and shoot at Juniper. Carter managed to disarm Eva, but she was too fast and was able to escape, while Juniper died on the ground.

Eva later reappeared from inside a pipe and killed Li with a shot to the head, and while Sawyer retaliated, Eva managed to shoot him in the leg, escaping from the gunfire.

Decades later, a young Natasha Romanoff, would be trained in a similar program and she would even take the name "Black Widow" for her own, during her time as a spy, assassin and an eventual superhero.

The "Graduation Ceremony" involves the agents being forcefully sterilized. Removing their ability to bear children, supposedly makes the Red Room graduates better killers, they'll never have to experience such weakness as worrying about a family. Decades after the procedure, Natasha Ronanoff is still haunted by it, and even views herself as a monster because of it.

Trivia

 * In the comics, the USSR had a "Black Widow OPs" in which young female orphans, are brainwashed, and trained in combat and espionage at the covert "Red Room" facility. Natasha Romanoff was one of these women. Agent Carter showrunners Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas stated in an interview that the Russian Assassin Program is the precursor to the Black Widow Program.