"The Cold War isn't thawing; it is burning with a deadly heat. Communism isn't sleeping; it is, as always, plotting, scheming, working, fighting." - Richard M. Nixon

Nearly two decades before Natalia was born, Captain America captured the imaginations of fearful and war-weary people across America. The collective genius of Abraham Erskine and Howard Stark had made the super-soldier dream a reality; sabotage by Germany's HYDRA prevented it from materializing into a full-fledged army. Although the Soviets were allies with the United States, the super-soldier knowledge was not shared with them. They could see with their own eyes the power of the "Star Spangled Man" as he rallied and led ordinary men into battle. Stalin believed what was good for the red, white, and blue would be even better for the Red. Soviet efforts were futile until the capture of Berlin in April of 1945. In the Führerbunker that contained the body of the Nazi leader and in the SS-Hauptamt, they found files detailing the experimentations of Nazi doctors and scientists in many arenas. Several HYDRA elements had gone rogue by the end of the war and the rest had been destroyed by Captain America, but the extensive paper trail of the SS made sure their work was preserved. With the Captain dead as well, at least as far as anyone knew, the Soviets were in a position to achieve ascendancy.

In the beginning, the Red Room Academy was a lot like Natalia's first school. She loved it. She missed her parents, of course, especially her mother's soft smiles and her daddy's big bear hugs, but she quickly discovered that crying was frowned upon. No one hugged her in this place, but if she worked hard enough and did everything she was told, then she was praised by Uncle Ivan and the teachers. Some of the girls weren't as good as she was. They misbehaved or couldn't do their lessons correctly. A few went away, one or two at a time, leaving behind stripped and empty cots among the two long rows in the large dormitory. She tried not to look at them as she got into her own bed and pulled the covers high up around her ears. The older girls told whispered stories about the bad things that happened to girls who had to leave, shushing when the old lady who watched over them at night came in to make sure they were asleep. The blankets here were warm and there was plenty of food. They served sweet fruit pudding with dinner every day, and pudding was her favorite. She was always very sleepy at night, sleepier than she ever remembered being in the old apartment. Maybe it was because she was learning so much. She would be a good girl and the best student so she would not disappoint Uncle Ivan... so no one would send her away, too.

The sixties became the seventies, and the world outside the Red Room continued to change. A series of economic measures that came to be called "Nixon Shock" ended the existing system of international monetary exchange. The world would later watch Nixon resign in the shadow of the Watergate scandal. Palestinian terrorists murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. The next year, Egypt launched a surprise attack on Israel. Later the two countries would sign a historic treaty after their leaders met for secret negotiations with Jimmy Carter at Camp David. Saigon fell, and with it died the last American hopes in Vietnam. The whole world craved oil, and many countries found that they could not get what they needed as Arab nations flexed their newfound political muscles. Apollo 17 would mark the last time a man set foot on the moon, though the Soviet Union was making strides in space stations, beginning with Salyut 1. With the rest of her nation, Natalia mourned the three cosmonauts who died in 1971, but this occupied little of her attention. At age eleven, she still had much to learn to be useful to her country, as those brave men had been.

Natalia was also not aware of two very different boys who were born in the United States the same year the cosmonauts died. These boys would be orphaned as she had been, and both would one day make profound impacts on her life. She could have picked out Tony Stark's New York birthplace on a map, since she had memorized the most important geography of the Soviet Union's greatest rival, but the small town of Waverly, Iowa had no significance in her world. With a single-minded determination she had surpassed all the other students at the Red Room, including girls who were years older than her. She still loved school, and had also come to enjoy the extreme physical demands placed upon her. As she grew taller and her body developed into that of an adult woman, she adapted with lithe grace. At twelve she was coltish and angular, strong for her age, but looking like she was all skinny arms and legs. By fourteen her gangly lines had become generous curves, accented by pouty lips and dark-lashed turquoise eyes that made even happily married men stop and look twice. She wouldn't be much older when she learned exactly what those looks meant.

It was only the required visits to the doctors that Natalia didn't like. She wasn't sick; she never got sick. That didn't seem to matter. At least once each week she had to strip completely naked and put an itchy, crackly paper gown over her goose-bumped skin. Then she had to wait on an exam table in a room with pea-green ceramic tiles on the walls, a beige linoleum floor with a drain in the center, and stainless steel counters. In that ugly room she would be weighed and measured, poked and prodded, given shots or "treatments" that left her feeling strange: sleepy or sick to her stomach or like she was floating on a hazy pink cloud. The doctors wore white smocks with matching white aprons, caps, and masks, and always rubber gloves covering their hands. They never introduced themselves to her, but it seemed to be the same set all the time, so she made up nicknames based on the few distinguishing features she could see: a pair of round, wire-frame glasses; thick black eyebrows like twin caterpillars; a dark birthmark high on one cheek; freckles dotting the bridge of a slender nose. That made the impersonal manipulations and invasions of her body somewhat more bearable, even when they spoke about her like she wasn't there...