Generally, tankies are individuals who advocate for authoritarian regimes while claiming both they and the regimes are leftists. These regimes usually include russia, china, or North korea. Communism is a classless, moneyless, stateless society. Every single country that tankies usually advocate for fails in every single one of these criteria, and so I do not believe it is useful to refer to them as communists.

These definitions may be flawed, but they are what I am currently using, which was the question.