Stanislav Redens

Who was Stanislav Redens?

Stanislav Frantsevich Redens 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, 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.