Riga’s best Olympic-sized swimming pool, Sino-Soviet relations, and Latvian History.

Today we are at Riga’s best Olympic-sized swimming pool, “RTU Kipsalis.” The pool is located over the river, 17 minutes from Liden & Denz by bus, and it features an olympic-sized 50m pool, saunas, a cafe, and a gym. RTU Kipsalis is, and by a long way, the strangest pool I’ve ever swam in and it is this strangeness, любезный читатель (dear reader), which I hope to convey to you today. This is the first in a series of posts in which I want introduce you to Latvia’s history, not in the sense of events and persons, but in the sense that a tourist experiences Riga- the mix of architecture, language, and culture. The confusion, the beauty. Riga; a city which educates us on foreign relations not as a textbook phenomena, but as an interaction between two people with different languages; a church which was nearly dismantled under the Soviet Union; a monument many times renamed. This pool, like this country, is unusual.
Swimming (in Latvia)…
In Australia, especially if you live near the beach, swimming is like a second language; it is a habit developed in childhood, incidental to youth, and much cherished in adulthood. It is the bar, the cafe, the Saturday morning liaison. Here, though, in Riga, and particularly in Winter, after a large meal at LIDO, when snow the snow falls and the darkness arrives just after midday, the swimming pool does not seem particularly enticing. It seems cold and distant. Luckily, I had visited RTU Kipsalis in summer, so none of these illusions have prevented me from returning there many times over the last few weeks.
Entry to RTU Kipsalis costs between 8 and 12 euros depending on the hour and whether you have with you a student card. You must bring slippers and a swimming cap. You can leave a card, for example a drivers license, at the front desk in return for a locker. Once you pass through the gate you have two hours which, considering what I am about to tell you about the change rooms, elapses sooner than you might expect.
You will walk down a long walkway which features, strangely, a series of underwater windows. At the end of the walkway there are four change rooms; two of them are open (the first on your left). Go inside; Michael Jackson or Eric Clapton will greet you. You’ll need to find your locker, change into your swimmers, take a shower and walk though to the pool.
Underwater viewing at RTU Kipsalis. My video
Everything is otherwise as you might expect. The lifeguard will be in slippers holding a warm cup of tea. He’s friendly, and he speaks Russian (when a large group of young men arrived I asked him if it was the Latvian national team. “Swim team? It’s Latvia!” He laughed). You will find four lanes closed to the public for no obvious reason (except when the scuba divers arrive). dedushkas will be doing breaststroke in the ‘fast lane’ and in the slow lane, well, expect variations of style hitherto unseen.
Yes. Welcome to swimming, in Latvia.
As you may know, swimming has not been inconsequential in the course of Eastern European history. In a moment, I want to retell the story of Khrushchev and Mao’s consequential meeting in a swimming pool in Beijing. Does this story have anything to do with RTU Kipsalis? No, not particularly, but this pool is weird. It’s Soviet. It was built by a now non-existent regime. And this weirdness remains; it’s to be found everywhere in this city. It’s weird, visiting some suburbs in Riga populated by Soviet apartment blocks. It’s weird that the Raddison Hotel and the Freedom Monument stare at one another. This is a confused country- a beautiful one, but with an urgent and tangibly ongoing history, and an identify which is anxious. And this, друзья, has been one of the more surprising benefits of studying Russian in Riga; this city has introduced me to the study of foreign relations beyond theory and textbook… it is an issue alive and personal. This country’s Soviet past is not, or at least not totally, in the past.
This is what I found myself reflecting on next to the lifeguard with a Latvian name and a tongue fluent in Russian, German, and Latvian; in a Soviet swimming pool owned by a University established by Tsar Alexander II (RTU, then “Riga Polytechnicum”), in a country under three different empires since 1940, where movies are shown in three languages and which, every year on March the 16th, commemorates the Latvian soldiers who fought with the SS during the Second World War. This is an unusual country.
Khrushchev and Mao*
In the early-mid 1950s, despite the apparent inevitability of ideological and strategic alignment between Maoist China and the Soviet Union, a series of awkward and counterproductive meetings occurred between Khrushchev and Mao which ultimately frustrated closer co-operation. Reflecting on his 1957 visit to Beijing, Khrushchev recalled his reception as “typically oriental. Everybody was unbelievably courteous and ingratiating, but I saw through their hypocrisy…. I remember that when I came back I told my comrades, ‘Conflict with China is inevitable.’” He was right; Mao did not intend to ingratiate the 200 pound Soviet leader. After ordering that the Soviet delegation be put up in an old and uncomfortable hotel, Mao set to work at agitating all of his Soviet counterpart’s sore spots; he spoke down at him, smoked (he knew that Khrushchev hated smoking) and refrained from making any of the commitments which Khrushchev sought. The next day, at his private Zonghanhai residence, Mao, having learnt that Khrushchev could not swim, arrived dressed in swimmers and a bathrobe and, inviting Khrushchev to stand in the shallow end, began swimming laps. Mao then asked Khrushchev to join him in the deep end, and when the latter refused, some floaties, (‘water wings’ as Kissinger famously called them) were produced. Khrushchev later reflected:
“He’s a prizewinning swimmer, and I’m a miner. Between us, I basically flop around when I swim; I’m not very good at it. But he swims around, showing off, all the while expounding his political views…. It was Mao’s way of putting himself in an advantageous position.”
Plainly, Mao sought to and succeeded in humiliating Khrushchev, and immediately after this event Sino-Soviet relations rapidly deteriorated.
“Mao swimming in the Yangtze at the age of 72. His fat made him extremely buoyant.” Mike Dash (2012), Smithsonian Magazine (link below). Image is in the public domain.
Latvian History
In my last post I referenced Tolstoy’s historiography. “Man’s mind,” Tolstoy writes in War and Peace, “cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find those causes is implanted in man’s soul.” At the start of the beginning of this post we walked by the underwater aquarium at RTU Kipsalis pool, Riga. We walked through a building of a bygone era. It’s very existence, I think, is enough to provoke questions- valuable questions- and this country, as I hope to show you, is an apt teacher.
If the question is “how is this Soviet swimming pool here?” we might answer, “because Latvia was once part of the Soviet Union.” Tolstoy asks us whether this is a sufficient answer. “History,” he writes, “is the life of nations and of humanity.” It’s population is all lives ever to precede us, the multitude of wills, fears, hopes cohabitant in thousands of millions of souls. “The only conception that can explain the movement of peoples,” Tolstoy writes, “is that of some force commensurate with the whole movement of peoples.”
So, любезный читатель; whether at RTU Kipsalis, between the apartment blocks of Pļavnieki (a post on this suburb to follow), or in Riga’s old town, it is important that we consider the history- the movement of peoples- in this now wonderful city; periods of darkness, of liberation, and of silence. It is important because that movement is ongoing; we stand amidst it. We are it.
Laef, currently studying Russian at Liden & Denz Riga
*Details for this section were taken from an article in Smithsonian Magazine by Mike Dash