I understand that the Cold War played a part in developing an international idea of human history, but I’m interested to see how the thoughts behind and practice of History more generally was changed by the Cold War as well as how historical interpretations of the Cold War changed as a result of significant shifts in the availability of information like the release of soviet archives in 1991. From what I’ve read there only seem to be vague references to this shift in forewords and conclusions of other books, but I would be really interested to find a book looking at the topic in depth.
TL;DR Does anyone know of books that approach the topic specifically or have a detailed understanding of how the Cold War changed the study of history?
I've touched on this before in regards to how historians look at the various nationalities that were included in the Soviet Union (here's a recent answer). But to summarize that part, during the Cold War historians largely had to rely on emigre information (in the form of memoirs or interviews), official sources (which were questionable at best), or their own understanding of how things were. The results were mixed of course, with the dominant viewpoint being that the Soviet Union was a "breaker of nations" (the viewpoint being espoused in Richard Pipes' works, the quote coming from Robert Conquest's biography of Stalin). With access to the archives this view changed, and the more mainstream idea is that the Soviet Union helped develop nationalities, through literary and cultural development (see Terry Martin and Francine Hirsch for two different treatments on that).
Regarding a book that covers the topic really well, I'd readily suggest Ronald Grigor Suny's Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution. It was published in 2017 to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution, and looks at the historiography of the Soviet Union, from the beginning to the end. Suny is the recognised expert on nationalities in the Soviet Union, and I'd also suggest a couple other books of his to get an idea of how the historiography changed (see below), but this is a one-volume book that will cover what you're looking for, and cites nearly every title released in the past century (though regrettably not in bibliographic form, but just footnotes).
Sources:
Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 (1954; later editions as well)
Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations (1991)
Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (2001)
Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (2005)
Ronald Grigor Suny, Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution (2017)