I dont call people tankies for thinking that communism is cool. Or that the west sucks.

I call people tankies, when they defend the ethnic cleansings and the great purge of Stalin by saying “we just had to defend ourselves” or portraying them as an integral part of the struggle better peoples lives.

Because i personally dont think that deporting entire ethnic groups from their homelands is needed to better peoples lives. I dont think the paranoid xenophobia of Stalin helped anyone and at worst crippled the ability of the Red Army to withstand the initial invasion of the Wehrmacht. I think his usage of the word “counterrevolutionary” completely devalued the word because calling Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotzky counterrevolutionaries for calling for collectivization, only to turn around and calling Bukharin counterrevolutionary for opposing collectivization is a sign for devolving into a byzantine power struggle.