By coincidence I’ve been reading Victor Serge recently and he had some interesting things to say about Kronstadt. In particular in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1967 OUP English-language edition, pp. 124-132) and in this letter available at the Marxists Internet Archive.

2. IF there was a “counter-revolution”, it started at the time when the first soviets(founded after the February revolution 1917) were suspended.. When the CPR(B) decided to turn the trade unions into “military units”/forbid all kinds of worker’s strikes.. After parts of the red guards were sent to crackdown revolutionary uprisings such as in Kronstadt (Trotsky: “kill them like rabbits”)..
Created the first “gulags”.. And so on, and so on..

BTW.. NK have nothing to do with any kind of socialism(SOCIALISM IS THE TRANSFORMING SOCIETY BETWEEN CAPITALISM AND COMMUNISM, THE SOCIETY OF COMPLETE FREEDOM, WITHOUT EXPLOITATION AND OPPRESSION) - it’s just a “red painted” feudal society (aeh.. in some/many parts it’s a kind of fascism!!).

I take your point in the sense that the term ‘Stalinism’ can be used too freely to describe any sort of society that one just doesn’t like. Personally though, I think it is a useful term to describe all those societies that had their origins in Stalin’s Russian counter-revolution of the late 1920s. The Eastern European states and North Korea were formed after WWII as ‘people’s democracies’ which was basically a way of attempting to create client states that would extend the Russian sphere of influence beyond its borders. But they were also ‘Stalinist’ in other ways - they modeled their economic development on the Russian state as well as aspects of their political systems, security apparatus etc. This is not to say that they were exactly the same as Stalinist Russia, but just of a similar type. I also don’t mean to imply that they didn’t change from the fifties onward, but I would argue that they remained fundamentally the same sort of society (ie state capitalist) whether or not Stalin was still alive.

Again, I can agree with your final point if you mean that ‘Stalinism’ is often used without justification purely as a term of abuse by rightwing commentators and historians. But when I use it about North Korea or the former Eastern Bloc countries I’m referring to an actual historical system of politics, economy and ideology that had a definite origin in the Stalinist counter-revolution.