Kazan phenomenon

I was recently reading a bit online about something called the "Kazan phenomenon." From what I have read so far, the "Kazan phenomenon" is a term for the rise of juvenile delinquency in the 1970s in the city of Kazan among both Russian and Tatar youths and the resulting moral panic in the USSR. When the Soviet system began to disintegrate in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the street gangs transformed into more sophisticated mafia organizations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazan_phenomenon

My questions is why did juvenile delinquency start to become a problem in the 1970s and why in Kazan of all places? Was the moral panic exaggerated or was it a serious problem? It seems like the problem was very real, especially since the street gangs become real mafia organizations. Also, what steps, if any, did the Soviet authorities take to try to stamp out or prevent juvenile delinquency?

Thanks.

Quote:

My questions is why did juvenile delinquency start to become a problem in the 1970s and why in Kazan of all places?

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It didn't. The Soviet Union had literally millions of street children hardly anyone cared about when it was founded in 1924.
Stalinism too created additional millions of hardened criminals. In fact you can trace the origin of Russian criminal-prison "subculture" to the GULAG system.
As for your question the obvious answer is that Soviet society had already started to decay in the 70s-80s with juvenile or any other delinquency as just another symptom of the general issue.

Isnt criminality result of many factors, but including the crowed cities that are the result of urbanization and population growth ?

On the other hand, you can barely know the size of a problem from testimony without hard data.

For one : If a murder happens in my neighborhood, its something trivial if i am not connected to he victm. (i live in a big city).

If a murder happens in a rural town in sweden, it might very well be described as a big problem by the locals.

In other words, isnt this a PERCEPTION ?