The reason that MovingThrowaway said ‘Almost none of us were alive when Khrushchev rolled tanks into Hungary’ is that certain British socialists coined the pejorative ‘tanky’ to nickname communists who approved of the Warsaw Pact intervention in the Hungarian People’s Republic (and later, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic), but hardly anybody uses the pejorative this way anymore.

In practice, application now varies widely, from approving of the Bolsheviki to opposing the Ukrainian government to suggesting that maybe North Korean politicians think and behave like ordinary human beings. The contemporary criteria are so variable that many would argue that the term is too vague to be useful.