Stanislav Redens

Stanislav Frantsevich Redens (Станислав Францевич Реденс, Stanisław Redens; May 17, 1892 – January 21, 1940) was a Soviet secret police official, one of those responsible for conducting mass repressions under Joseph Stalin. Redens was himself executed in 1940, after being arrested at the end of the Great Purge in 1938.

Born to a Polish worker’s family in Novominsk in the Łomża Governorate of the Russian Empire, Redens received a limited education and began working in metallurgy in 1907. A Bolshevik since 1914, he was briefly mobilized into the army during World War I but was soon demobilized and returned to political activity in time for the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Redens began to work for the newly established Cheka in 1918, amid the Russian Civil War. He was energetically involved in dekulakization in Ukraine. Redens held important positions in the Crimean GPU in 1922-1923. Though made a chief of the Transcaucasian GPU in 1928, Redens was gradually sidelined by his own deputy Lavrenty Beria. In 1931, he was appointed the GPU head in the Byelorussian SSR and then in the Ukrainian SSR. During his tenure in Ukraine, Redens gained fame for crackdown on farmers, which contributed to the Holodomor, the starvation of millions of Ukrainians as part of a larger famine across the Soviet Union. In January 1933, he was recalled to Moscow and placed in charge of the NKVD units in the Moscow Oblast where Redens spearheaded purges following Sergey Kirov assassination in 1934. Redens was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union in 1937 and appointed as People's Commissar for Internal Affairs of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic in 1938. He was arrested on charges of being a member of “Polish subversive-spying group” in November 1938 and shot in January 1940. He was rehabilitated under Nikita Khrushchev in 1961.

Redens was married to Anna Sergeyevna Alliluyeva (1896–1964), sister of Stalin’s second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva, also an Old Bolshevik and former Cheka officer who spent 6 years in prison under Stalin. Their son, Vladimir Alliluyev (Redens) (born 1935), published, in 1995, his memoirs "Chronicle of a Family" which advocated Russia's return to Stalinism and was condemned by Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva.