It's possible... It depends on the scene.

An example may clarify this problem:

Suppose that you create a simple polygon sphere. The scene is quite small, because you need very few data for the sphere.

Now use the smooth command. If you don't delete the history, Maya has the info for the sphere (few data) and the info for the smoothing (also few data) and these are the only things that Maya would save in a file. So when you reload the scene, Maya will recreate all the steps used during the creation of the models.

Now delete the history... Deleting the history, Maya cannot know anymore what steps you did for modeling the smoothed sphere, so what happens is that you have a sphere compose of a (huge) list of vertices.
If you save the scene now, Maya has to save all this positions (and may be a really big number!) instead of few parameters, so the file is bigger.

That's all

Bye!!