Why did Khrushchev allow Mao to humiliate him by meeting in a swimming pool?

In brief, one of the the answer lies in the two political figures Khrushchev had to deal with: Mao and Tito. Both Yugoslavia and the People's Republic of China operated in a very nebulous position within the Communist bloc in 1950s and 60s. Unlike other leaders of the Warsaw Pact states (Romania being an somewhat odd exception), neither Tito nor Mao were dependent upon the USSR to keep their political power. In this situation, state visits were often occasions to flaunt their independence vis a vis Moscow. Khrushchev's memoirs recall the swimming pool incident in these terms, as part of Mao's attempt at gaining an advantageous position. Nor was the 1958 swimming pool the only incident of political grandstanding by Mao. The prior year on a state visit to Moscow, the Chinese premier refused to sleep in the lushly furnished Kremlin bed, would only eat Hunanese dishes prepared by his own chefs, and during a performance of Swan Lake at the Bolshoi, refused to sit with Khrushchev in the special box, but "with the masses" in the first rows (which, ironically, were filled with KGB agents).

While such grandstanding could reflect Mao's own boorish behavior and personality, note that in these above instances there is a tacit rebuking of the luxury and pomp of the post-Stalin leadership. One of Mao's main contentions during this period was that Maoism represented a true Marxist-Leninist path. Implicit within these assertions was that the USSR had departed from the orthodox path.

In both 1956 Polish and Hungarian affairs, the Chinese weighed their options as to whether back the Soviets or the Eastern Europeans. Although they eventually backed the USSR, the Soviet officials resented Chinese interference within the politics of the bloc and Mao positioning himself as the bloc's unifier. The Hungarian Invasion of 1956 had already shown that Mao was staking out a position that the PRC was more ideologically pure than the USSR. In the run up to 1956, the PRC had increasingly critiqued the Soviet Union as being ideologically corrupted both in public and in private. The rise of alternative youth culture, consumerism, and the normalization of relations with the West were all alleged evidence that the Warsaw Pact states were practicing an effete form of communism. Mao was by the mid-1950s positioning both himself and the PRC as the hope to rekindle a supposedly flagging movement for world revolution. The PRC sponsored trips for Warsaw Pact students and other groups to visit China and see ideology in action. At the same time, the invasion of Hungary led to another PRC critique of the USSR, namely that it was acting like just another great power. This was one of the crucial sticking points in the Sino-Soviet alliance and not an insignificant reason as to why it failed. Moscow expected its allies to be dependent upon their elder Soviet brother, but China refused to continence anything that smacked of an imperial relationship.

Another part of the equation here is that Khrushchev was a fundamentally different kind of leader than Stalin. Despite his bluster and tendency to outbursts, Khrushchev did not engage in the type of personality cult and ruthless pursuit of his enemies as his predecessor. Two popular Soviet jokes of the Thaw capture the differences between the two men: "During Stalin's time we had a personality cult, now we have a nonentity cult." and "Khrushchev goes to a museum of modern art and stops before a mirror. 'Ah, what a wonderfully realistic portrait of a pig!' he exclaims". While Stalin was certainly fodder for many jokes in the USSR, most of these jokes emphasized his mercurial use and abuse of power. In contrast, Soviet jokes about Khrushchev emphasized his weaknesses, crude manners, and incompetence beneath his bluster. For leaders like Mao and Tito, there were aware that they were dealing with an individual that was not nearly in such a strong political position as his predecessor. Stalin's own behavior in prior state negotiations underscored the differences between the two regimes. Stalin tended to threaten and cajole while maintaining a relatively inflexible negotiating position. Mao's 1949/1950 trip to the Soviet Union was quite different than the one he would undertake six years later. Mao received little fanfare in the Stalinist press, the accommodations and food were quite terrible, and Stalin completely controlled the agenda for summit meetings. When Khrushchev sought to redress these slights in the 1957 meeting through lavish attention, Mao is reported to have sneered "Look how differently they're treating is now. Even in this Communist land, they know who is powerful and who is weak. What snobs!"

As to why would Khrushchev stomach such behavior, the answer is that he had very little alternative. Khrushchev's main goal was the stabilization of the Communist bloc under Soviet leadership. Both Tito and Mao were powerful leaders with a global following in the 1950s. Even Yugoslavia at this time was considered something of a success story with European intellectuals like the British historian A. J. P. Taylor celebrating its achievements in defusing nationalist tensions. For Khrushchev to bring these two states back into the Soviet fold would have been a major diplomatic coup both domestically and abroad. That he failed to do so undermined his position within the Soviet government and made a partial contribution to his fall.

Sources

Jersild, Austin. The Sino-Soviet Alliance An International History. Chapel Hill, [North Carolina] : The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Taubman, William. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. New York: Norton, 2003.