Russian historians - How would you approach analyses by Soviet historians?

There's a common trap of looking at the historiography produced during the Soviet Union as being the result of a filtration through an ideological matrix and thus relatively worthless. The result is that it is tempting to write off Soviet historiography as instrumentalism trying to justify the existence of the Soviet state and erecting a tiresome teleology wherein the sum of Russian history culminated in Lenin and 1917. The problem with this dismissal of Soviet historiography is that it reduces Soviet historians to almost stock figures out of 1984 and this runs against the grain of much of the social history that came out of Glasnost and the fall of the USSR which showed individuals were seldom the catspaws of the state. There are three strategies I would suggest to approach Soviet period.

Take the Marxist-Leninist ideology on its own terms. One of Stephen Kotkin's great phrases is the Soviet system was "booby-trapped with idealism." If one can look beyond its teleological elements (all roads lead to lead to Lenin), Soviet historiography was often interested in aspects of the Russian historical experience that the historians of the imperial period did not. Although it's outside the USSR, the GDR's case is instructive. Its historical establishment actually produced exceptional groundbreaking work on the German peasantry's responses towards the Reformation. Theology had predominated much of the Reformation historiography but the GDR's historians helped bring the masses into focus (along with a number of Western social historians).
Treat the Soviet historiography as a source in itself. Although Marxist-Leninism was a major aspect of Soviet intellectual life, it was never a stable nor consistent ideology throughout the lifespan of the Soviet Union. David Brandenberger has done excellent work showing how the early 1920s saw a cosmopolitan Soviet approach to the past incorporating the many peoples of the empire gave way to a Russocentric approach under Stalin with the tsarist elements expunged (the cult of "hands-on" figures like Suvorov, Lomonosov, or Tolstoy and valorizing the Russian people) . Furthermore, despite its assertions to the contrary, there were lines of continuity between the tsarist and Soviet intellectual life. Francine Hirsch monograph on soviet anthropology shows how Soviet anthropologists repackaged tsarist notions of European cultural superiority over the peoples of Central Asia into a Marxist-Leninist framework. Soviet historiography was not a single, undifferentiated mass, but rather changed over time and historical contexts. Looking at this scholarship with the meta-question "how does this reflect the intellectual mentalities of this particular Soviet period?"is one contemporary intellectual and social historians have used to great benefit.
Finally, it is important to consider the possibility of history as an escape from the Soviet system. The further one went away from the "third rails" of Russian history (1917, Stalin or Trotsky, tsarist radicals, etc.), the safer an intellectual found themselves. Historians of National Socialism termed a flight inwards towards non-ideological subjects "inner emigration" and this terminology can be applied to intellectual experience in the USSR. One could construe the above GDR example as evidence of such a phenomena; the 1525 Peasant's War was not a topic that was going to draw the attention of the state if a historian produced a heterodox interpretation. Remember, these historians were trying to navigate a social and governmental system that capriciously punished intellectuals that inadvertently deviated from the mercurial state orthodoxy.