With the Black Widow movie coming out in May 2020, and the cast steadily being announced, the audience is sure to see a lot of Russian heroes and villains. While Marvel and DC both have their own powerful Russian characters, Marvel takes the cake with pure quantity. With a variety of Russian characters in the forefront and backstories, these characters are sure to make an appearance in multiple storylines.
Though Black Widow is the most well known Russian hero, it begs the question; how many characters are actually from Russia and just how powerful are they? Here is Black Widow: 10 Most Powerful Russians In Comics, Ranked.
Red Star
The first person on this list is Leonid Kovar from the DC Comics. As a kid, Leonid and his father, an archaeologist, came across a spaceship crashed into a river. During their investigation, the ship exploded, thus giving Leonid powers beyond his wildest dreams.
He has the power of energy projection, flight, superhuman speed, agility, strength, and stamina. He is known to be a part of the teen titans and, in fact, he was known as Starfire before taking the moniker of Redstar.
9 Colossus
Piotr Rasputin grew up on a peaceful farm in Russian with his brother and sister (seen later on this list). His powers developed suddenly when he saved his sister from a runaway tractor. This was the beginning of Piotr's new life with powers and his journey to the X-Men.
With the power to turn his body into steel, his strength is increased beyond human proportions. He is also very valuable to the X-Men because he was one of the strongest mutants.
8 Kraven The Hunter
If you have read Spider-Man, you know who this man is. When Sergei Kravinoff first began his career as a hunter, he used normal weapons to kill animals. Later on, when he grew tired of that, he began killing them with nothing but his bare hands.
Sometime after this, Sergi met a Voodoo witch Doctor who gave him a special drink. The magical potion gave him the power of enhanced ability and the skill of a jungle cat. This potion also gave him extended life, allowing him to remain young for a very long time.
7 Black Widow
Yes, there is another Black Widow and her name is Yelena Belova. She went through the same Red Room Academy training but did not receive the same enhanced abilities as the others. An interesting fact about Yelena is that her physical scores outranked Natasha Romanov's, the Black Widow we all know and love. Yelena will be in the Black Widow movie coming in 2020.
Yelena has no powers but is a master of weapons and unarmed fighting. She is also extremely intelligent and strong.
6 Black Widow
The next person on this list is, of course, Black Widow, or Natasha Romanova. In the last decade, Black Widow has become extremely popular due to her role in almost every Marvel movie to date. With the 2020 Black Widow movie on the horizon, she is sure to grow in popularity in the near future.
When Natasha was a baby, she was put into The Black Widow Ops Program. This program gave her multiple enhanced abilities, such as strength and durability. Her immune system is also enhanced along with her longevity.
5 Darkstar
Laynia Petrovna is a mutant who was first seen as part of a team hoping to return Romanov to the USSR. Darkstar did not bring her back because she decided to join a Los Angeles Black Widows team known as Champions. Fun fact: Petrovna is the sister of Red Guardian.
Considering she can conjure an interdimensional black force at will, she is very powerful. She can also use this dark force to teleport, fly, and conjure weapons.
4 Magik
Illyana Nikolievna Rasputina, more commonly knows as Magik, made her first appearance in Giant Sized X-Men #1 in May 1975. She is the younger sister of Colossus and will be seen in 2020's New Mutants movie.
Magik's mutant power is teleportation, but she has also become an amazing sorceress over the years. She is also the sorceress supreme of her own limbo dimension and uses her power to make armor and a soulsword.
3 Superman
The next person on this list is Superman from Superman: Red Son. This was a three-part series written by Mark Miller in 2003 under the DC Elseworlds event. Elseworlds consisted of multiple writers making different stories using the most popular characters at the time and putting them in different scenarios.
The story of Superman: Red Son begins with Superman's ship hitting Ukraine instead of the Kent's farm in Kansas. This minor change really alters the character's thoughts and motivations and shows Superman in a whole new light.
2 Mikhail Nikolaievitch Rasputin
Mikhail Rasputin is the brother of Magik and Colossus. His journey begins when he was younger and worked as a cosmonaut for the Soviet Union. The mission went wrong when his crew was caught in a dimension rift. From there, he found a wife on a distant planet, started a civil war, and had to close another rift that killed thousands of people, including his own wife.
Mikhail is known as an alpha mutant, which means that he is extremely powerful. He also has the ability to manipulate subatomic matter to his will.
1 Omega Red
The most powerful Russian in comics is Omega Red. Omega Red is a supervillain that often goes toe to toe with the X-Men. His first appearance was in X-Men #4 in January 1992. Omega Red also goes by the name Arkady Gregorivich Rossovich, but not a lot is known about his past, except that he was a killer in Russia.
What makes him so powerful is his mass amount of mutant powers. He has all the basic powers like superhuman strength, stamina, speed, agility, reflexes, and durability, but that is not all. He also the very unique ability to secrete a dangerous pheromone from his body from his death spores. These pheromones can weaken or even kill if inhaled. He can kill without laying a finger on his enemy.