The Red Room, also known as the Black Widow Program, was a secret Soviet-Russian training program that involved taking young women and turning them into elite spies and assassins known as Black Widows. Initially using psychological conditioning to make the Widows obedient, by the 2000s the program had shifted to using mind control. The program was terminated in 2016 when former Widows Natasha Romanoff, Melina Vostokoff and Yelena Belova destroyed the Red Room Academy and killed its leader, Dreykov.