Dacha Opened for Rare View by Reporters

At the end of a road, clearly marked with a “Do Not Enter” sign, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev gets away from the cares of Moscow in a two-story, mustard-colored dacha set in the middle of a birch and fir forest.

Western reporters were given a rare glimpse of the house Thursday when Gorbachev met there with visiting Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

The dacha itself is not imposing by the standards of international heads of state. Architecturally, it is of a late 19th-Century style that is popular all over Europe.

The house has a green roof, topped by a tin-roofed cupola with a weather vane displaying the numbers 1956. A Soviet official said that is the year it was built.

Gorbachev met Baker in a small room set with a round wooden table and surrounded by what appeared to be empty bookcases, giving the appearance of a library without books. The room has a panoramic view of a marble terrace that overlooks the Moscow River and an expansive grass field, dusted in snow Thursday.

Unlike Camp David, the U.S. presidential retreat in Maryland, there is no sign indicating that Gorbachev’s dacha is at hand. However, there is a high green wall with an ornate, mustard-colored gate house that indicates something important must be going on inside.

The Soviet Union has never announced the location of the dacha, and reporters are seldom allowed near it.

A photographer from Tass, the Soviet news agency, previously had taken photos of the building and its grounds, but they were never published.

Although Gorbachev is known to have an apartment in the fashionable Lenin Hills section of Moscow and an office in the Kremlin, he is believed to do much of his work at the dacha.

Soviet officials who accompanied reporters to the dacha declined to say where it is.