Tankie

Tankie was a pejorative term referring to those members of the Communist Party of Great Britain that followed the Kremlin line, agreeing with the crushing of revolts in Hungary and later Czechoslovakia by Soviet tanks; or more broadly, those who followed a traditional pro-Soviet position.
As the term has entered reasonably widespread use within the British left, it has also been used more loosely to indicate people with traditional and rigid hard left views.
Support for the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia
The term originated as a phrase for British hardline members of the Communist Party. Journalist Peter Paterson asked Engineering Union official Reg Birch about his election to the CPGB Executive after the Hungarian invasion:
:"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'."
The support of the invasions was disastrous for the party's credibility.
He says:
:"I came up with this word to describe Lloyd, Hitchens, Aaronovitch and the rest of them … It honours the pro-war ex-left's origins by acknowledging the neo-conservatives, that bunch of ex-Trots who believe in the violent export of democracy throughout the world on the back of the US-military industrial complex, and the tankies, the old diehards of the British Communist party who supported Stalin or Moscow's line at every turn, above and beyond accepting unquestioningly Soviet tanks trundling through Budapest or into Czecholoslovakia"<ref name="rowson" />

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