The USSR under Stalin was exposed to a lot of propaganda and facts were conveniently altered, so how did historians decide what was likely the truth about that time period?
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First, it is actually pretty difficult to hide the facts that matter, especially from the outside world and especially for long.
There was a serious grain shortage in the Soviet Union around 1970. The Soviet Union did everything in its power to hide this fact from its citizens, but everybody who went to Moscow could see the bread lines, and everybody outside of the country knew that the Soviet were forced to “buy” grain from the West, at prices that made it clear they were more or less begging.
Many facts are forgotten, many facts are consciously or subconsciously misframed, but few facts in history are successfully *suppressed*.
Second, to a certain degree this is just what historians *do*.
Every report about every ancient battle exaggerates troop numbers, plays up the author’s side’s bravery, carefully avoids talking about the author’s favorite general’s tactical mistakes, invents speeches and dialogues that never happened, or all of the above.
Historians have been aware for a very long time that they had to work around propaganda efforts and popular narratives and that it was therefore part of their job to seek out as many different accounts as possible, question every source, scrutinize every plot for plot holes, and so on. They have gotten very, very good at this over the centuries.
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