Tankie

According to The Independent, after the Prague Spring, "In Communist Party circles, including those of the British CP, the term 'tankie' was subsequently used to describe those party members who supported the crushing of the Prague Spring by force of arms."[2] According to The Guardian, "tankie" is a term for Stalinists.[3]

Leftist writer Carl Beijer claims there are two distinct uses: the original, which was "exemplified in the sending of tanks into Hungary to crush resistance to Soviet communism. More generally, a tankie is someone who tends to support militant opposition to capitalism", and the more modern online variation which means "something like 'a self-proclaimed communist who indulges in conspiracy theories and whose rhetoric is largely performative'", although he is critical of both uses.[4] "Tankie" has thereby re-emerged as internet slang for an authoritarian left-winger or socialist.[5] According to Vice, the contemporary expression is particularly popular among young democratic socialists.[6]

According to Christina Petterson, "Politically speaking, tankies regard past and current socialist systems as legitimate attempts at creating communism, and thus have not distanced themselves from Stalin, China, etc."[7]

The term originated as a phrase for British hardline members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The "Tankie" wing of the CPGB was also sometimes called "Stalinist" and was associated with the views of the strong CPGB presence in trades unions.[8][9] Journalist Peter Paterson asked Amalgamated Engineering Union official Reg Birch about his election to the CPGB Executive after the Hungarian invasion in 1956:

When I asked him how he could possibly have sided with the "tankies", so called because of the use of Russian tanks to quell the revolt, he said "they wanted a trade unionist who could stomach Hungary, and I fitted the bill."[10][11]

The support of the invasion of Hungary was disastrous for the party's credibility.[1] The CPGB opposed the invasion in Czechoslovakia in 1968, though a hardline faction supported it.

The term continued to be used into the 1980s, especially in relation to the split between the reform-minded "Eurocommunist" wing of the CPGB, and the traditionalist, pro-Moscow group; the latter continuing to be labelled 'tankies'. For instance, in the 2006 play Rock 'n Roll by the Anglo-Czech author Tom Stoppard, the character Max, based on Eric Hobsbawm,[12] discusses with Stephen what to read to hear what is happening in the Party, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Their options are Marxism Today and the daily paper, the Morning Star:

MAX: Marxism Today? It's not so much the Eurocommunism. In the end it was the mail order gifts thing. I couldn't take the socks with little hammers and sickles on them.

STEPHEN: Well, Read the Morning Star and keep up with the Tankies.

MAX: The Tankies … How the years roll by. Dubcek is back. Russia agrees to withdraw its garrisons. Czechoslovakia takes her knickers off for capitalism. And all that remains of August '68 is a derisive nickname for the only real communists left in the Communist Party.[13]

The term is sometimes used within the UK Labour Party as slang for a politically old fashioned leftist. Alasdair Campbell reports a conversation about modernising education, in which Tony Blair:

"said 'I'm with George Walden on selection' … DM [ David Miliband ] looked aghast … [Blair] said when it came to education, DM and I were just a couple of old tankies."[14]

More pejoratively, in 2014, Boris Johnson referred to Jeremy Corbyn and the left wing of the Labour party as "tankies and trots".[15]

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