Born to a Polish worker's family in Tykocin 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.

Though made a chief of the Transcaucasian GPU in 1928, Redens was gradually sidelined by his own deputy Lavrenty Beria.

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.