‘Tankies’ – Western Defenders of Stalin, GULAG and Totalitarianism – Making a Comeback

Paul Goble

            Staunton, January 4 – When Moscow sent tanks into Hungary in 1956 to crush the revolt against Soviet occupation, a group of British leftists celebrated what the Soviet Union was doing and said “send in the tanks!”  From that meme, those who supported totalitarianism in general and Stalin and the GULAG became known in certain circles as “tankies.”

            Now, at a time when support for Stalin and his system are growing in the Russian Federation, Lenta commentator Mikhail Karpov says, “the tankies” are making a comeback in many Western countries, often turning to Facebook and Twitter to defend the indefensible and celebrate that which most people have condemned (lenta.ru/articles/2020/01/04/tankies/).

            Today’s “tankies” argue that Stalin and Mao were “fighters for human rights” and that any criticism of the Eastern bloc is “’western propaganda.’” They deify North Korea – “’a paradise for working people’” – and they condemn the protests in Hong Kong as the machinations of the CIA against the working class.

            Such people don’t call themselves “tankies,” of course. Rather they position themselves as “’real communists’” and “Marxist-Leninists,” but it is clear that for most of them, when they talk about “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” they are more animated by the word dictatorship than by “proletariat.”

           

            “Following the principle that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’” Karpov continues, “they consider that any regime which opposes ‘American imperialism’ is good because it is fighting with imperialism.”  Sometimes it seems they are being ironic, but most are completely serious.

            Thus, they post pictures online of Stalin declaring “a great post, now we’ll sent you to the GULAG.”   But according to the Lenta commentator, “the main bastion of ‘the tankies’ on the Internet is Twitter where the most well-known “tankie” is Red Karina, the screen name of Molly Klein, daughter of the inventor of Playboy TV.

            Her chief contribution to thought, Karpov continues, is to suggest that Stalin was a transsexual.   Others have fought over whether Stalin as a person from the Caucasus was “white,” or whether he and Mao as fighters against American imperialism were in fact “blacks,” a term they use not in the technical racial sense but in an ideological one.

            “The tankies” of today, he points out, are defenders of political reeducation camps for Uyghurs because the  Chinese GULAG is a positive thing and there is no such thing as Chinese imperialism; and they oppose anarchists because the anarchists want to do away with the state and the police on which a GULAG depends.

            Anarchists, in the “tankie” understanding, Karpov says, are “liberals with aspirations.” Some “tankies” favor using humor to attack their opponents, but others don’t because they are convinced that “fun is a bourgeois value.”