Have Russia’s plunging currency and rapidly slowing economy, two problems that have been gradually worsening over the course of 2014, had any impact on the country’s demographic trajectory? Well, judging by the latest data from Rosstat the answer is “maybe!”

Through the first 11 months of the year, births are up, deaths are down, and the Russian population has grown naturally by more than it did in 2013 (which itself was the first natural growth since the collapse of the Soviet Union). 2014 as a whole has been a pretty decent year and has seen the broad continuation of the modestly positive trends of the recent past. Russians, on average, are living a little longer and having a few more children than they did previously.

However, when you look at November 2014 by itself, the numbers are a lot less rosy. In fact, they were downright awful. When compared to November 2013, births last month were down by a whopping 5.3%, from about 154,000 to about 146,000.

First, a couple of qualifiers. Demographic data on a month to month basis can be quite noisy: it’s dangerous to read too much into any particular month because in a population of 143 odd million people, the baseline level of variation is quite high. Put very simply: in a country as populous as Russia, there are going to be months where several thousand more people are born (or die) not due to any real change in the country’s fundamental demography but simply due to chance. This is why it generally makes sense to analyze demography on reasonably long timescale.

With all of those stipulations, however, the odds that the swoon in November births is totally unrelated to the country’s rapidly escalating economic crisis are slim. How much of the change is the result of random variation and how much is the result of economic problems is a very valid discussion. It is entirely possible, if unlikely, that some, or perhaps even most, of the observed decrease in births is simply statistical noise. But it just doesn’t seem probable to have such a huge decrease in births during a time that Russia’s economic outlook has been getting progressively worse. The births happening now are the result of decisions being made back in March and April: given what was happening at the time, it doesn’t seem improbable to imagine that a significant number of Russian families decided to either postpone or forgo having another child.

We’ll have to wait and see before we can know for sure. At a minimum we’ll need another 4 or 5 monthly Rosstat reports before any kind of firm conclusions are possible. But the very early indications are that Russia’s mounting economic problems, problems which started to surface at the beginning of 2014 and which have gotten a lot worse ever since, are going to negatively rebound on its demography.

I’ve made the point before but it’s worth making again here: everything has a price. Russia’s demographic improvements weren’t an “accident” and they weren’t the result of “good luck.” Rather, they reflected the expenditure of some serious resources on the part of the government as well as massive and broad-based improvement in popular living standards.

Those decisions about resource allocation are now being re-evaluated: while it is spending ever-larger sums of money on the military, the Russian government is shutting down the “maternal capital” program and dramatically slashing the healthcare budget. My guess is that those decisions are going to have a negative impact on the demographic outlook. The early birth data, which don’t yet incorporate the much scarier news of recent months, seem to coincide with that view.