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

Candidate passages:
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. 
Neo-Stalinism is a political term referring to the promotion of positive views of Joseph Stalin's role in history, the partial re-establishing of Stalin's policies on certain issues, and nostalgia for the Stalin period.
The term is also used to designate the modern political regimes in some states.
This is usually done by critics of those states, who argue that their political and social life bears similarities to Stalin's regime. 
Immediately after regaining independence in 1918, Poland was faced with a war with the new Bolshevik Russia, with the Polish–Soviet War eventually ending up with a Polish victory at Warsaw, spoiling Lenin's plans of sending his Red Army west to spread the communist revolution.
For the next two decades, Poland was seen by the Soviet Union as an enemy; eventually an agreement with Nazi Germany allowed the Soviet Union to successfully invade and destroy the Second Republic in 1939.
The brutal mass murder, known as the Katyn massacre, of 20,000 Polish officers that took place soon afterward, in the background of various Soviet repressions of Polish citizens, became another event with lasting repercussions on the Polish–Russian relations.
After the Second World War and with the Allies' permission during the Yalta Conference, the Soviet Union whose Eastern front rolled up Nazi Germany from the East ended up in control of the Polish territory.
Stalin decided to create a communist, Soviet allied Polish state, the People's Republic of Poland.
Poland became part of the Eastern Bloc, as the People's Republic of Poland.
Soviet control over Poland lessened after Stalin's death and Gomułka's Thaw, and ceased completely after the fall of the communist government in Poland in late 1989, although the Soviet Northern Group of Forces did not leave Polish soil until 1993. 
The Stalinist system was based upon the system conceived by Vladimir Lenin, often referred to as Leninism.
Certain historians and political scientists blame Lenin for the evolution of the Soviet political system after his death.
Others, such as Leonardo Schaprio, argues that the system itself, from 1921, evolved a inner-party democratic system to a monolithic one in 1921, with the establishment of the Control Commission, the ban on factions and the ability given to the Central Committee to expel members they seemed unqualified.
These rules were implemented to strengthen party discipline, however, the party continued under Lenin and the early post-Lenin years to try to establish democratic procedures within the party.
For instance, by 1929, leading party members began criticized the party apparatus, represented by the Secretariat headed by Stalin, of having to much control over personnel decisions.
Lenin addressed such posing questions in 1923, in his articles "How We Should Reorganize the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate" and "Better Fewer But Better".
In these, Lenin wrote of his plan to turn the combined meetings of the Central Committee and the Control Commission into the party's "parliament".
The combined meetings of these two would hold the Politburo responsible, while at the same time guard the Politburo from factionalism.
Admitting that organizational barriers may be inadequate to safeguard the party from one-man dictatorship, recognized the importance of individuals.
His testament tried to solve this crisis by reducing both Stalin's and Leon Trotsky's powers.
While some of his contemporaries accused Lenin of creating a one-man dictatorship within the party, Lenin countered, stating that he, like any other, could only implement policies by persuading the party.
This happened on several occasions, such as in 1918 when he threatened to leave the party if the party did not go along with the October Revolution, or persuading the party to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, or the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP).
Lenin, a noted factionalist before the Bolshevik seizure of power, supported the promotion of people he had previously clashed with on important issues to the Politburo; Trotsky and Lenin had had several years of violent polemics between them, while Grigori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev both opposed the Central Committee resolution which initiated the October Revolution.
From 1917 to the mid-1920s, congresses were held annually, Central Committee was convened at least once a month and the Politburo met once a week.
With Joseph Stalin's consolidation of power, the frequency of formal meetings declined.
By the mid-1930s, the Central Committee began meeting only once a month, and the Politburo convened at most once every third week.
The Politburo was established, and worked within the framework of democratic centralism (that is a system in which higher bodies are responsible to lower bodies and where every member is subordinate to party decisions).
The nature of democratic centralism had changed by 1929, and the freedom of expression which had been previously tolerated within the party, was replaced with monolithic unity.
The main reason being Stalin's defeat of the opposition; the Left Opposition, the Right Opposition etc.
It is generally believed that under Stalin the Politburo's powers were reduced vis-a-vis Stalin.
Stalin defeated the Left Opposition led by Trotsky by allying himself with the rightists within the Politburo; Nikolai Bukharin, Aleksey Rykov and Mikhail Tomsky.
After defeating the Left Opposition, Stalin began attacking the rightists (referred to as the Right Opposition) through his supporters in the Politburo, the Central Committee and the Control Commission.
Stalin and his companion supported an undemocratic interpretation of Lenin's "What Is to Be Done?".
Throughout the late-1920s, Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich (a Stalin ally), wrote and campaigned for a party organizational by-law which reduced inner-party democracy in the name of hierarchy and centralism.
With the defeat of the other factions, these interpretations became party law.
To strengthened the system of centralized decision-making, Stalin strengthened the Politburo by appointing his allies to high standing offices outside the Politburo; for instance, Molotov succeeded Rykov as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissar in 1930, to reduce the chance of another independent locus of centralized power coming into form which could threatened him and the Politburo, Secretariat and the Orgburo.
During this period, the office of General Secretary became paramount.
The Politburo, which was nominally responsible to the Central Committee and the party Congress, became responsible to the General Secretary.
The General Secretary, the formal head of the Secretariat and the Orgburo, "came to exercise enormous weight in decision-making."
The Secretariat and Orgburo were responsible for personnel appointments in the whole party, and so were used as a machine by Stalin and his allies to promote likeminded individuals.
Vyacheslav Molotov and Kaganovich played a key role in strengthening the role of the Secretariat and the Orgburo in party affairs.