So First of all, someone can give you a much better answer than me since you are asking about Marxism and historiography which is really not my forte.

But Marxist was actually pretty popular in western history departments in the west just a few decades ago. If you want to look at Marxist historian's reading of history from the English speaking world, you can look at the books of Eric Hobsbawm. Hobsbawn wrote on "the short 20th century" covers the "age of extremes" from 1914-1991. And covers and criticizes historical state Socialist regimes as quite -against the principles and visions of Marx and Engels.

Second of all, it should be noted Marxism is a -method- when it comes to historiography. And the method has being absorbed into mainstream historiography as part of its intellectual evolution. It's just that for the most part we have moved past Marxism as mainstream in academia. But over the decades we have discarded a lot of stuff (i.e labor theory of value) which are found to be invalid. Saying that we cannot judge Marxist regimes because we are not Marxists is a bit like saying we cannot judge Freud's work on psychology because the field of psychology have long since moved past Freud.

Lastly, I think if you actually try to argue about historical Communist states from a Marxist perspective (so full disclosure I used to be enamored with Marxism and Communism for a while in my undergrad and went to a bunch of my school's Communist meetings), you realize it's an....let's say interesting exercise in that you almost feel like you are role-playing. In the sense that there is intense and aggressive disagreements between different sects of Marxists which are far more intense and aggressive than between Marxists and non-Marxists. Try arguing, for instance, from a Trotskyist perspective against a Stalinist, or a Maoist against someone who thought 1970s USSR was a good vision for society. You feel as though as you are re-enacting a 1920s era Soviet politburo meeting or the cultural revolution.

Ultimately non-Marxist critiques against Marxist regimes are perfectly valid and the whole "well you have to be Marxist" is a huge ad homenin and a gigantic red flag about the other side inability to argue -against- people who don't accept their premises. And frankly plenty of Marxists think that Stalin and Mao were horrible monsters who should be condemned.

Let’s start with the obvious: people find validation wherever they want to. There remains (bizarrely) a small tribe of hardcore Stalinists who deny almost everything we today know about the regime, preferring to cling to old propaganda images. Stalin was great, Soviet stronk, everything was sunny until Khrushchev arrived, etc, etc. For validation these people either rely on crackpots (eg Grover Furr) or cherry-picking from or misinterpreting legitimate research (Getty being a favourite for some reason). There’s no real point engaging with this sort – their use of history is inherently dishonest.

(As an aside, this has nothing to do with Marxism per se. There are plenty of respectable academics working within a Marxist framework whose works are dismissed by Stalinists for not toeing the correct line. Even Soviet historians can be written off as ‘revisionist’ if writing in the post-Stalin era.)

So let’s ignore those. Traditionally English-language historiography on the Russian Revolution and Soviet system has broken down along two lines:

• The traditionalists. If there is a grain of truth in depictions of hostile Western academics, it lies in the Cold Warriors that initially dominated the field in the US. While often more nuanced than often accepted, and usually containing genuinely valuable research/insights, the 'totalitarian' school focused near-exclusively on ideology/politics, to the exclusion of social or grassroots history. Their assessments were generally hostile to Soviet Union and prominent members advised on US foreign policy. See Pipes, Ulam, Shapiro, Conquest, etc.

• The revisionists. From the 1970s, a new generation of historians began to challenge the prevailing consensus and put social history front and centre. Rejecting the assumption that all agency came from the ‘top down’ led to a far more nuanced understanding of 1917 and the Stalinist system. This put them on a collision course with the ‘totalitarians’ and the resulting polemics weren’t pretty. But a lot of the older orthodox assumptions now look unsustainable in this light. See Rabinowitch, Fitzpatrick, Lewin, Smith, etc.

(While the above was happening in America, the British were doing their own thing. Influenced by Marxism, the likes of Carr and Davies were producing incredibly detailed works on Soviet policy that lacked the anti-Soviet bent of the US traditionalists. This work has, in my opinion, held up pretty well over time.)

Since the collapse of the USSR, things have become more muddied. The initial burst of triumphalism from the traditionalists faded as the archival evidence generally, if not always, vindicated or at least fleshed out the revisionist arguments. It is difficult to argue today, for example, that October 1917 was a narrow intellectual endeavour or that Stalinism was maintained solely via terror. At the same time, Stephen Kotkin detonated the post-modern bomb on the field in the 1990s, giving rise to a slew of new studies examining how people learned to ‘speak Bolshevik’. At the more extreme end (eg Jochen Hellbeck) this brings us full circle into neo-totalitarianism.

All the above are professional historians who, even when their theses are flawed, have added to our understanding of Russian history. If they’re ‘bourgeois historians’, in the sense that they write within the confines of a capitalist society, then so are all academics. To reiterate: there are plenty of Marxist historians of the USSR writing in the Western tradition. Anyone who uses this as an excuse to ignore an argument is just playing fast and loose with sources.