More often than not, the term "archival revolution" in Soviet studies is usually shorthand for the Stalin period. This was not accidental since the 1930s was one of the third rails in Soviet studies during the Cold War. Not only were a lot of archives restricted, but the methods for a foreign scholar to work in the USSR made poking around in this period quite risky. Not only did foreign scholars have to apply to the government for their topic, they were assigned a Soviet academic advisor and attached to a parent Soviet university, all of which regulated access to sources and corralled projects. But not all the problems for researchers of 1917 came from the Soviets. Western Soviet studies, especially in the US, had a strong emigre presence as well as conservative, anticommunist scholars like Robert Conquest or Richard Pipes. This quarter of Western academia held that the October Revolution was an illegitimate coup and discouraged graduate students from pursuing a topic they felt had been settled.

Western scholars though found in the 1970s that 1917 was a much safer Soviet topic than other areas of Soviet history. Part of the reason was that the Soviet academic system considered the runup to 1917 to be pre-revolutionary history and thus not as threatening for Western scholars to access the archives. Moreover, one of the boons of the emigre diaspora was that a the liberal opposition to the Bolsheviks often took some of their archives with them. Rabinowitch and Sheila Fitzpatrick were among the charter generation of Western scholars that managed to use the less restrictive archival access as well as Western-based sources to profitably study 1917. Detente and the decline of the aging Mandarins of Soviet/Russian studies in the West led to a reevaluation of 1917 in the 1970s.

The relative ease with which the 1970s scholars studied 1917 presaged a wave of scholarship on 1917 in the 1980s. The spirit that contributed to Perestroika meant there was a wider interest within Soviet academia to recover the origins of the Soviet experiment. This resulted in Soviet host academia being much more receptive to Western scholars looking into 1917. Much of the work in the 1980s incorporated Western methods of social history and moved away from the high politics that characterized earlier work on 1917. Diane Koenker, Donald A. Filtzer, William J. Chase, and Rex Wade all produced profitable studies of the early Soviet period in the 1980s. Much of this work examined 1917 and its immediate aftermath from below and how higher politics intersected with politics on the ground.

The fall of the Soviet Union did not so much change historiographic understanding of 1917 as expand it. Archival access for this topic was already quite open by Soviet standards in the 1980s and there was a corpus of existing historiography that meshed well with evolving scholarship. Much of the change 1991 had on studies of 1917 was two-fold. One, it was now much easier to gain access of distant parts of the former Soviet Union and the archives. Earlier studies often focused on the metropoles of Soviet power such as Moscow or Petrograd, which not coincidentally were the sites where foreign scholars had the greatest ease of gaining a sponsor. Post-1991 scholarship looked at the Revolution in the distant provinces such as Tashkent (Jeff Sahadeo), the Ukraine (Henry Abramson), the Don region (Peter Holquist), or a host of other regional studies. The breakup of the USSR along ethnic lines also underscored the different reactions to 1917 among the Empire's various subject peoples. These studies showed a more nuanced reaction to the Revolution than pre-1991 works which almost exclusively looked at Great Russian sources, whether from above or below.

The second way in which 1991 changed Soviet studies was in how historians approached the inevitability of Lenin and company seizing power. Rabinowitch had pioneered an approach to 1917 in which events led Lenin rather than vice-versa. The sudden collapse of the Soviet state and disappearance of the Communist Party's iron-clad control in the 1990s sanctioned this approach. Rather than looking at the Bolsheviks as the natural heirs of the Revolution, which was the common approach even through the 1980s, historians of the Revolution are now more attune to issues of contingency.

Access to archives has not led to a massive change in the scholarship for 1917 as it did for the 1930s (this genre of Soviet history arguably began in earnest because of 1991). Scholars in the 1980s had already pioneered a number of approaches that served as a basis for later scholars in the nineties and aughts. What happened in 1991 prompted not so much a revolution in 1917 studies but rather an evolution where approaches to both Revolutions became more expansive in scope and more nuanced when tackling the Bolsheviks' politics.