Redens, Stanislav Frantsevich

(1892–1940)

   An Old Bolshevik, Redens was a Polish worker who joined the Bolshevik Party in 1914 and entered the Cheka in 1918. He was Joseph Stalin’s brother-in-law, which initially accelerated his career but in the end led to his execution. Redens had married the sister of Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, and remained for many years a member of Stalin’s small inner circle. He served as the chief of the security service in the Ukraine during collectivization and the famine of 1933–1934, and as a reward he became head of the service in Moscow from 1934 to 1938.

   In January 1938, Redens was demoted and dispatched to Kazakhstan. Arrested in November 1938, he moldered in jail for 13 months. He was tried for treason in January 1940 and shot a month later. His arrest and execution have been explained by Stalin’s decision to reduce the authority of his in-laws in party politics. Redens’s Polish nationality may have hastened his fall as well: almost no Polish or Latvian “Old Chekists” survived the purges. The Russian archives also indicate that Nikolai Yezhov denounced Redens under torture, and that this convinced Stalin that Redens should be executed. Redens’s wife was not formally informed of his death, and she and her children continued to visit Stalin at his Moscow dacha.