Explanation: In 1956, Hungarian workers rose up against the repressive totalitarian apparatus that had been imposed on them by the USSR, and declared their intention to hold free and fair elections in the interests of creating a democratic socialist workers’ state.

There was some hesitation at the top ranks of the USSR, with the spirit of reform still going strong in the post-Stalin era. Notably, Soviet Marshal Zhukov, a hero of WW2, recommended that the Hungarians be simply allowed to find their own way. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev initially refused the demand of the hardliners in the Soviet Communist Party to take military action, but would eventually acquiesce. The decision was made by Khrushchev to crush the socialist revolution for fear of the USSR seeming ‘weak’, either to its enemies abroad or to domestic hardliners.

This display of the Soviet Union as a stronger power blatantly imposing its will on a weaker, fellow socialist country was the last straw for many Western Communists who had previously aligned themselves with the USSR. From this incident, wherein Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary, suppressing the protesters and workers’ militias with military force and re-installing the old undemocratic government of Leninist hardliners, we get the term ‘tankie’ - what Western leftists would increasingly call USSR-aligned bootlickers, emphasizing that their ideology was built not on the support of the workers as they claimed, but on brutal military rule and tribalism.