There's only so much one human head can hold; the rocket men who started out in the twenties and early thirties were the project leaders of the late thirties and forties, the experimenters of the thirties and forties were the project leaders of the actual space age; Tsander (most of the references I have to him spell it in the Russian style) was an ideas man, and a great one, but how at home he would have been in the nuts and bolts of practical rocketry, not many from his generation made the leap. (Von Braun was largely a propagandist in the American years, IMO.)
The big problem, the watershed, is that GIRD got the bulk of their funding from the military, under Tukachevsky's patronage, which made them collateral damage in Stalin's purges. Glushko denounced Korolev to save his own skin, after some of the early experiments did not go well.
That period of national paranoia is the problem, the Soviet space program was maimed in the womb by it, and Tsander's role, had he been alive at the time? As someone with personal ties to Lenin, he would quite likely have been an additional target. Being a Baltic German wouldn't help. The odds are that he would not have survived the Yezhovschina.
The best thing he could probably do for the Soviet space program, given how likely he is to be a victim of politics, probably would be to protect the rest of the group- not least from each other- by taking the blame. The idea of him being active into the fifties and sixties, you'd need a Stalin whose value system did not revolve entirely around politics for that.