The last century has been astonishingly unkind to Russia (the causes can certainly be traced into the 19th C, but by far the most and worst could still have been averted if WW1 had turned out differently). A much stronger Russia (which of necessity means a bigger one: a strong Russia is a lucky Russia has Ukraine) is certainly possible.
The eastern movement has been a trend in Russian history. A particularly strong US analogy would requirre major changes to society back well before Peter the Great, but certainly Siberia really started to fill up (well, I say "fill": this is Siberia we're talking about) through peasant colonisation after Stolypin's reforms.
As for an earlier industrial base, harder. Russia's industrial revolution started kicking in the 1880s, which was enough to put them behind everyone else in Europe (catching up such that Germany really felt it in 1916 when the Russians fine-tuned their war economy with the completion of important strategic railways and the upping of arms production) but not so very far behind the beginning of the industrial era.
I shalln't go pre-Petrine, when my handle on Russian history starts to loosen a lot faster, but the 18th C Russian state did have a pretty decent industrial base by the standards of the time, certainly more modern than some (like its neighbour, the PLC), this being a time before mass industrial capitalism.
A differant development from Alexandrine times onward (or before, in the 18th C, of course) could result in the conditions that made possible the industrial boom that began in 1885 earlier: stability in Europe and at the straits, a ready supplier of capital such as France and Belgium provided, serfdom abolished and continuing reforms of how rural society functioned. But hiking everything back by 20 years would be pretty optimistic.
However, several calamities in Russian history can be very easily averted.
No WW2 (cheap PoD: blow up Hitler, save Stresemann, yayz!) already does a huge amount. The sheer cost of the war in material, money, and above all men's lives was hard to fathom. A USSR which is never invaded will have a much larger resources base, a better demographic position for the Russians, no Warsaw Pact to hold it back and no overly ambitious Cold War against America. With the right post-Stalin developments, it could be with us today as a polity vaguely resembling modern China. That's an optimistic scenario, but both plausible and a much stronger Russia.
But you can go back earlier. The First World War and Russian Civil War also had massive consequences for the country's population and resource base, not to mention shaving off the edges and reversing a great deal of Russification. In 1914, Minsk and Kiev were Russian cities.
A Russia which, to be optimistic yet again, avoids WW1, liberalises, raises the Jews to a position of loyal integration, and so on would be a very major power in the world. There's a lot that can go wrong on the way, but it could all go right.