Question: How were historians' views on the Bolshevik victory changed by Stalin's death?
About the article "October Revolution", section "Soviet historiography".

Candidate passages:
In 1952, Robeson was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize.
In April 1953, shortly after Joseph Stalin's death he wrote a eulogy entitled "To You Beloved Comrade", in the "New World Review", in which he praised Stalin's "deep humanity," "wise understanding," and dedication to peaceful co-existence with all peoples of the world calling him "wise and good."
He also praised Stalin as a man that the world was fortunate to have for daily guidance: "Through his [Stalin's] deep humanity, by his wise understanding, he leaves us a rich and monumental heritage.
"Robeson's comments of praise were made prior to Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 "Secret Speech" at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regarding Stalin's purges.
Though Robeson would continue to praise the USSR throughout his life, he would neither publicly denounce nor praise Stalin personally following Khrushchev's 1956 revelations.
Many historians, Robeson scholars and advocates feel that his statements about Stalin and the Peace Prize itself are routinely used out of historical context to defame or disparage his legacy by his critics.
In turn, many critics and historians feel the eulogy and prize are solid proof of his being a "hard line Stalinist."
Martemyan Ryutin was an Old Bolshevik and a secretary of the Moscow City Communist Party Committee in the 1920s.
In December 1927–September 1930, he was a candidate (non-voting) member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party and a supporter of the moderate ("Rightist") wing within the Party led by the Communist theoretician Nikolai Bukharin and prime minister Alexei Rykov.
When the latter were defeated and demoted by Stalin in 1928–1930, Ryutin was demoted as well.
In September 1930 he was expelled from the Communist Party; six weeks later, he was arrested for oppositionist views.
He was released on January 17, 1931, and allowed to re-join the party, but remained silently opposed to Stalin's regime. 
Soviet historiography of the October Revolution is intertwined with Soviet historical development.
Many of the initial Soviet interpreters of the Revolution were themselves Bolshevik revolutionaries.
(For example, the revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote a major narrative of the October Revolution.)
After the initial wave of revolutionary narratives, Soviet historians worked within “narrow guidelines” defined by the Soviet government.
The rigidity of interpretive possibilities reached its height under Joseph Stalin.
Soviet historians of the October Revolution interpreted the Revolution so as to establish the legitimacy of Marxist ideology, and also the Bolshevik regime.
To establish the accuracy of Marxist ideology, Soviet historians generally described the Revolution as the product of class struggle.
They maintained that the Revolution was the supreme event in a world history governed by historical laws.
The Bolshevik Party is placed at the center of the Revolution, exposing the errors of both the moderate Provisional Government and the spurious “socialist” Mensheviks in the Petrograd Soviet.
Guided by Vladimir Lenin's leadership and his firm grasp of scientific Marxist theory, the Party led the “logically predetermined” events of the October Revolution from beginning to end.
The events were, according to these historians, logically predetermined because of the socio-economic development of Russia, where the monopoly industrial capitalism alienated the masses.
In this view, the Bolshevik party took the leading role in organizing these alienated industrial workers, and thereby established the construction of the first socialist state.
Although Soviet historiography of the October Revolution stayed relatively constant until 1991, it did undergo some changes.
Following Stalin’s death, historians such as E. N. Burdzhalov and P. V. Volobuev published historical research that deviated significantly from the party line in refining the doctrine that the Bolshevik victory “was predetermined by the state of Russia’s socio-economic development”.
These historians, who comprised the “New Directions Group”, posited that the complex nature of the October Revolution “could only be explained by a multi-causal analysis, not by recourse to the mono-causality of monopoly capitalism”.
For them, the central actor is still the Bolshevik party, but this party triumphed “because it alone could solve the preponderance of ‘general democratic’ tasks the country faced” (such as the struggle for peace, the exploitation of landlords, and so on.
)During the late Soviet period, the opening of select Soviet archives during glasnost sparked innovative research that broke away from some aspects of Marxism-Leninism, though the key features of the orthodox Soviet view remained intact.
Sergei Mironovich Kirov (; – 1 December 1934), born Sergei Mironovich Kostrikov, was a prominent early Bolshevik leader in the Soviet Union.
Kirov rose through the Communist Party ranks to become head of the party organization in Leningrad.
On 1 December 1934, Kirov was shot and killed by a gunman at his offices in the Smolny Institute.
Some historians place the blame for his assassination at the hands of Stalin and believe the NKVD organised its execution, but any evidence for this claim remains elusive.
Kirov's death served as one of the pretexts for Stalin's escalation of repression against dissident elements of the Party, culminating in the Great Purge of the late 1930s in which many of the Old Bolsheviks were arrested, expelled from the party, and executed.
Complicity in Kirov's assassination was a common charge to which the accused confessed in the show trials of the era.
The cities of Kirov, Kirovohrad, Kirovakan, and Kirovabad, as well as a few Kirovsks, were renamed in Kirov's honor after his assassination.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union Kirovakan and Kirovabad returned to their original names: Vanadzor and Ganja, respectively. 
A stenographic record of this Politburo meeting has not been located.
A number of historians, led by Robert Conquest, have adopted the argument first advanced by Boris Nicolaevsky in "The Letter of an Old Bolshevik" (1936), that a division existed in the Politburo between moderates and hard-liners.
Stalin argued that Ryutin deserved the death penalty, because his "Appeal" could inspire its readers to acts of terrorism and a palace coup.
A moderate bloc of Politburo members opposed Stalin, because they were unwilling to violate Lenin's stricture against the spilling of Bolshevik blood.
Sergei Kirov supposedly spoke with "particular force against the recourse to the death penalty" and was joined to a greater or lesser extent by Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Valerian Kuibyshev, Stanislav Kosior, and Yan Rudzutak, while Stalin's position was supported only by Lazar Kaganovich.
According to historian Arch Getty, Nicolaevsky's story is a "persistent myth."
He points to an incident from eighteen months before when the Politburo voted for a very harsh penalty for the opposition and Stalin moderated the punishment.
It is known that Ryutin received the harshest penalty.
He was sentenced to ten years imprisonment.
Former United Opposition leaders Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, who had read the Platform, were also expelled from the Communist Party in October 1932 and exiled to the Urals region for failure to report the incident to the secret police.
Ryutin was eventually executed on January 10, 1937, during the Great Purge, which also claimed the lives of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Kosior, Rudzutak, Ugalanov, Yenukidze, Rykov and most of the rest of the Old Bolsheviks.