I was going to say that the question is impossible but, in truth, plenty of historians have tried to answer it. The below response rambles without firm conclusions because I don't think anyone has produced a satisfactory answer. More to the point, no. There is no consensus.

(Disclaimer. As you'll notice, I'm not a huge fan of counterfactuals.)

For the old school American historians, writing in the early Cold War, 1917 was the 'original sin' of the Soviet Union, forever tainting and ultimately dooming it. For these historians (and I'm thinking of Pipes, Malia, Daniels, etc) the Revolution brought about, and could only bring about, a supposedly 'totalitarian' regime that would go on to rival Nazi Germany in brutality. And so on.

But this was 'top down' history that ignored the massive social pressures 'from below' buffeting the Tsardom and later Provisional Government. With these discarded then the question becomes whether reform could have followed a more competent Tsar or if the liberals had cooperated more or whatever. We're into parlour games territory here.

The mirror image to this was in Britain where the influence of Trotsky, via Isaac Deutscher, was impressive. The histories produced in this current (eg Deutscher, Carr and Davies) were, to my mind, more valuable but still contained a significant flaw. In accepting the necessity of industrialisation, and shunning the moral high-ground of their US counterparts, they implicitly accepted the necessity of Stalinist industrialisation. Hence the trend to break Stalin down into 'accomplishments' and 'excesses'. Yes, Stalin killed millions but, hey, he also built blast furnaces. As if one automatically went hand in hand with the other.

But this is all Cold War stuff, just to give you an idea of where we've come from and the poles of the argument. Very few people today have a vested stake in arguing one way or another over what is ultimately an unanswerable question. If there is a general feeling (and here and drawing on the fact that even Figes accepts this) it's simply that the Tsardom was just very unlikely to survive the war.

The one group that does occasionally worry about these counterfactuals is the economists, who love their little models. Occasionally a paper will pop up suggesting that Tsarist economic growth would have continued or that it wouldn't. Both Alexander Gerschenkron and Paul Gregory, writing in very different periods, have argued that the late Tsardom was entering 'modern capitalist growth' which would have continued had revolution not intervened. RW Davies and Robert Allen would disagree - pointing out a number of factors that would have constrained it.

Either way - does it matter when the political structures of the Tsardom were woefully incapable of managing this growth and the resultant social upheaval?

(For what it's worth, Allen's Farm to Factory concludes that Russia without revolution would have ended up more like an India than a Germany. But, as I hope the above has shown, I wouldn't place much confidence in such an assertion.)

I'm not even going to go into the living standards discussion because you can (hopefully) see the problems with making such assertions. Even when we clearly restrict ourselves a single metric, eg economic growth, there is no real way of knowing what would have happened.