Words never did mean anything. See “woke” or countless other terms. Language is not a fixed medium but a field of ideological struggle shaped by material reality. When a term starts to leak into the mainstream discourse it is being transmogrified by bourgeois cultural hegemony.

So yeah, tankie is done. Close the book. But if we need to refer to critical supporters of the USSR’s actions in the Hungarian Uprising its not hard to use other more direct words or phrases. Defender of AES. Proletarian internationalist.