Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956

70 Years ago the USSR rolled tanks into Budapest to crush the Hungarian uprising. British communists invented the term "tankie" to describe comrades who supported the soviets crushing dissent.

Based socialist revolt against authoritarianism.

I like this summary from https://communist.red/the-1956-hungarian-revolution-a-struggle-for-genuine-socialism/

Here we republish an extract from the new introduction to Peter Fryer’s ‘Hungarian Tragedy’, by General Secretary of the RCP, Ben Gliniecki. This begins our series of articles to commemorate the Hungarian people’s noble and valiant struggle for genuine socialism.

Seventy years ago, in October 1956, Hungarians flooded into the streets. For eleven days, they fought the Stalinist dictatorship. By the end, they were battling Soviet tanks street by street. This was a revolution for genuine socialism in Hungary.

The Hungarian regime was hated. It was socialist in name but bureaucratic in essence – modelled on the Soviet Union under strict control by Moscow. This lifeless government had been bureaucratically deformed ever since its birth in 1949. But it was rocked in 1956 by a living movement for workers’ democracy against Stalinist repression. Contrary to Stalinist slanders, this was never a movement for the restoration of capitalism. It was an attempt by ordinary Hungarians to take control over their own lives and establish a healthy socialist society.

The revolution was ultimately crushed with an iron fist and Soviet tanks. The scale of the threat it posed to the Soviet bureaucracy can be measured in the lives that were lost. Tens of thousands of Hungarian workers were killed and countless more injured.

Remember, don't let the tankies label legitimate socialist revolutionaries like in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 as "capitalist counterrevolutionaries". Alexander Dubcek (Prague Spring) was a saint and Imre Nagy was decent for his role in the Hungarian revolution.

Even knowing the real history of the term, I still headcanonically think of it as someone who looks at that famous picture of a guy standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square and finds themself rooting for the tanks.

It's the same picture

Thats the same thing. Those tanks rolled over students before two photo was taken

Oh, so it wasn't the CIA that invented it?^/s^

LOL. Maybe it was MI6

It was hidden Ukrainian spies, obviously