You may want to check my current TL project (see Signature).
While I think that a democratic Russia is absolutely not "nearly impossible", there is also no reason at all to assume things would look like in Western Europe - and more importantly, Western Europe would not look like OTL at all with such a world-changing divergence, neither would much of the rest of the planet. Without the October Revolution, and the enusing Komintern and anti-communist policies, four fifths of the 20th century would look utterly unrecognizable to us.
On some details:
You'd have more development in the run-up to WWII
Depends. If this far-left democratic Russia is led by a parliamentary majority / presidents / ... with an SR (Socialist Revolutionary) background instead of a Marxist (RSDLP-fission products) one, which is not at all unlikely, then fast industrialisation policies are not a given. Equitable land distribution and a support for rural development would be top priorities, as well as immediate relief and improvement of living conditions in the towns, but not necessarily a massive industrial build-up. IOTL, Stalin et al. had two reasons to industrialise the country fast: 1) because only an industrialised country would be a country strong enough to withstand whatever the 20th century might throw at Russia / the Soviet Union, 2) because industrial labour was still deemed the most reliable and natural backbone of a socialist society. With an SR-led Russia, one of these reasons (no. 2) would be absent. So, you might as well see industrialisation actually slowing down in the 1920s without it necessarily picking up ultra-speed in the 1930s.
but without butterflying away Hitler, Russia is still going to take immense casualties and will likely spend most of the 1940s-1950s in recovery mode
No October Revolution may well butterfly away Hitler. For one thing, WWI is going to go (and end) differently, Versailles will be different... there won't be a Moscow-remote controlled KPD... hell, it's not even a given that Italy turns fascist to inspire him politically.
No WWII as we know it doesn't mean that Russia doesn't get thrashed, though, of course. It just doesn't mean it's going to be the genocidal onslaught from the West of OTL.
At some point the socialist government is going to face pressure to "open up" the economy, and you're likely to see a transfer of power to what we would consider a right-wing party led by a Russsian equivalent of Reagan or Thatcher. By 2019, living standards will probably be comparable to those in Western Europe.
First of all, without the October Revolution, "socialism" may not look like OTL's Gosplan economy at all. Whether or not it will face pressures to "open up" (whatever that means, I suppose introducing more capitalism), is open to me. Of course it faces such pressures all the time, and things might swing back and forth. But the triumph of Reagonomics IOTL is a unique outcome of a specific set of circumstances pertaining to OTL's 20th century, not the outcome of some universal structure. It would be unthinkable without the Chicago school of economic theory, which in turn was deeply influenced by the 1920s Socialist Calculation Debate, which in turn was a reaction to Bolshevik economic policies. Different socialist structures in Russia (and elsewhere?) will lead to very different reactions in bourgeois economic thought.
And ultimately, the 2019 equality with Western Europe idea, while positive in not dooming Russia to be some sort of failed state under any condition, is not something I'd subscribe to. For one thing, IOTL it was exactly this "opening up" in Thatcherite terms which caused Russia's severe structural economic crisis of the 1990s and the subsequent semi-corporatist/neo-populist backlash of the Putin years. And for another, there has been a structural economic disequilibrium in Europe from the Late Middle Ages onwards, the clear signs of which you can trace not only in the fact that specialised labour has been invited from the West to settle in the East repeatedly (but never the other way round, until the late 20th/early 21st century), or even in popular Western European stereotypes about the backwards East (while there had never been such stereotypes in the East about the West). Whatever the reasons (I'm not going to start the old Mongol debate all over again), there was a division of labour on the continent, with specialised crafts, finance etc. concentrated in the Western half, while the Eastern half exported grain and other agricultural products.
Overcoming this is possible, as OTL has shown, but not at all easy, and having the party of the peasantry in power (the SRs) is not necessarily your best bet for a quick fix here. It's not just about getting more people out of agriculture and into industrial jobs, it's also about broadening skilled labour and industrial R+D, accumulating capital, being able to dictate favourable terms of trade globally etc. Democracy is not a bad structure to accomplish this, but it's also not a panacea for all ills. A democratic Russia might just as well go a path which more closely resembles OTL's Latin American republics.