The cause of the fire at GITIS could have been a short circuit in the electrical wiring, said Sergei Gedin, head of the fire extinguishing service of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Emergency Situations in Moscow. Artist, GITIS professor Dmitry Krymov discussed the situation with presenter Alexey Korneev.

The roof of the building caught fire on Friday night. It took about three hours to extinguish the fire; the fire area was 500 square meters. m. There were no casualties as a result of the incident.

— Were you at the scene of the events yesterday?

- Yes.

— How quickly did the firefighters arrive? Because this issue is being discussed, there is a fire department there, I am also a former student of GITIS, literally a few hundred meters away, right?

- Dozens even.

- So how did the firefighters act?

- You know, I don’t want to say anything bad about firefighters and I can’t, I have no right. But yesterday at the fire I didn’t see a single person running. Actually, a fire is when everyone is in a hurry and doing something, as I understand it, and so everyone understands. Ask any person on the street, a fire is an emergency when everyone carries some kind of buckets to extinguish it. Maybe they have or had some amazing plan, which is not visible from the outside, but is visible only from the inside to great specialists. But no one was in a hurry at all. The students shouted as they stood on another street: why aren’t you extinguishing the fire? Put it out! Why don't they put it out?

They put up a ladder, but no one is climbing. These are probably all very smart and experienced people, God grant them health and that they arrive on time and do their job, from the outside it was somewhat ridiculous and scary.

— How convincing is the version about the wiring? The directing department, which is located on the third floor and is now, in general, destroyed, was probably the most renovated.

- It is not destroyed. Kamenkovich, who now goes there, called me, he told me what is there now. He says: “God forbid, they now announce that it needs to be repaired.” Now, in my opinion, it’s time to hold a cleanup day and we can work on it, that is, fix the roof. In general, God forbid, they will now announce a major overhaul, and that’s all. Do you know how we do it? They will go through the strawberries with tanks, like plowing them. And everything will collapse. And then the students will go somewhere on the outskirts of the city, to some uncomfortable room. In general, the institute may be “killed” after this fire.

“They say that they recently took teachers to Garibaldi Street for something.”

- Everyone is terrified. I have not been there and will not go there. I just won’t, I don’t have time to go back and forth for half a day, it’s bullshit to build GITIS there. And I can tell you the same about the wiring. Posting or no wiring, but I see the draconian measures of Karina Lvovna, rector of GITIS, regarding “no smoking”. Everyone here is trying to stop smoking. But we have such a state that, you know, they teach everyone to wash their hands before eating. And so everyone was lined up and finally taught that no one smokes. But you also need to do the wiring, if it is wiring.

I have some other feeling that this is not wiring. But I don’t really have the right to talk about this, it’s just experience. Do you need to explain what's going on? Fire on Thursday at 11 o'clock at night, from the roof, lazy firefighters. They just gave us a building on Garibaldi.

- Too many coincidences, huh? And what are some of the economic parts of GITIS saying now?

“I haven’t talked to them, they are now walking in knee-deep water and looking at the extent of the damage, only now.” Some forecasts indicate when, perhaps, some training sessions will resume there. Kamenkovich just told me calmly on the phone, he is generally a brilliant person, we need to continue studying, tell your people to continue studying. We are now transferring to Fomenko’s workshop, our great director Andrei Vorobyov agreed. We’ll somehow hold out the time until things are sorted out with GITIS, just so that everyone doesn’t run away, don’t disperse, don’t rest, so that classes continue from today. And what is there, this is a huge department - our course is only one of five, six or seven that will be there on this large scale, I cannot say.

"The institute may be 'killed' after this fire"