Fighting Erupts at Barricades : 4 Reported Slain; Junta Seen Unraveling : Kremlin crisis: Yeltsin backers shot, crushed under treads, witnesses say. Elite troops reported ready to tighten noose on resistance in Moscow.

Russians acting as human shields for Boris N. Yeltsin battled tanks with stones and Molotov cocktails early today as Soviet army units crashed through barricades set up to protect Russia’s government. Two people were shot to death by soldiers and two others were crushed under the treads, eyewitnesses said.

Pro-Yeltsin forces, numbering 20,000 or more late Tuesday, huddled behind the inner rings of makeshift defenses at Russian government headquarters as the new rightist rulers in the Kremlin tightened the noose on the chief bastion of resistance to their coup. Yeltsin, now the leader and embodiment of democratic forces in the land, awaited developments inside.

Elite Soviet armored units were reported moving down Kutuzovsky Prospekt and other Moscow arteries toward the Russian Federation’s Parliament building, now protected by hastily assembled barriers of vehicles, paving stones and construction materials and a few tanks and Soviet soldiers who have proclaimed their loyalty to Russia’s president. But as of 6 a.m., with the sky gray and rainy, there was no sign of an all-out attack.

In additional developments:

* The hard-liners’ State Emergency Committee, reasserting an authority flatly rejected by many Soviet citizens as well as most of the world as stemming from naked force--ordered an 11 p.m.-to-5 a.m. curfew in Moscow, banned all but their own radio and TV broadcasts and told Yeltsin’s allies to clear away their barricades.

* Late Tuesday, as many as three of the committee members reportedly had resigned or were “ill”--the pretext used by the right-wingers to justify Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s removal as Soviet president. The news sparked intense speculation that the KGB chief, defense minister, Soviet prime minister and other plotters had a falling-out.

* Yeltsin, the first popularly elected president of Russia, demanded the right to meet with Gorbachev within 24 hours. There was nothing more definitive known about the 60-year-old Soviet leader, who had been on vacation in the Soviet south when he was deposed Monday.

* Hundreds of thousands of Soviets took to the streets to protest Gorbachev’s ouster, and work stoppages began from Siberia to the coal fields north of the Arctic Circle, but there was no sign of the general, unlimited nationwide protest strike Yeltsin called for Monday as a way to hamstring the fomenters of the coup.

Sometime after midnight, about an hour after the curfew went into force, a column of Soviet armor tried to smash through a ring of buses lined up on the perimeter of Russian authorities’ defenses. The defenders fought back with rocks, gasoline bombs, boards and whatever they could hurl.

Eyewitnesses said one teen-ager had tried to halt a moving armored personnel carrier by covering the viewing port with a piece of cloth, but the blinded driver crashed into another army vehicle.

The back of the vehicle flew open, the young man tried to jump in and soldiers inside shot him, said eyewitness Andrei Gusarov.

When another teen-ager tried to come to the aid of the wounded man, whose legs were dangling from the rear of the troop transport, he was shot as well, the witnesses said, and the vehicle, careening wildly, went on to crush two more people.

An angry crowd trapped the vehicle and four others in an underpass located about 50 yards from the U.S. Embassy building.

“You’re killing your own children! Why did you come here?” one man shouted in despair and anger. Incensed Russians set the rogue vehicle on fire with gasoline, but it eventually burned out. Mangled and burned-out wrecks of buses littered Moscow’s Garden Ring Road where the Soviet armor had tried to cut its way through. A promise from the Moscow military commander that the incident will be investigated by military authorities calmed the crowd somewhat.

Nine armored personnel carriers--which either had been surrounded and captured by Yeltsin supporters or whose crews had gone over to the Russian leadership--were consolidated into the defenses of the Yeltsin camp and took up positions near the Moscow River.

The midnight deaths were the first in Moscow since the right-wing takeover. Only one other shooting death by Soviet law enforcement officers and soldiers--in the Baltic republic of Latvia on Monday--has been reported since the coup began.

Early Wednesday, about 30 rounds of automatic gunfire were heard near the U.S. Embassy, but it was not immediately clear if the shooting signaled another clash.

A Russian official, who identified himself to the crowd as Chernyavsky, warned the crowd outside the Russian building that three columns of tanks were approaching from different routes.

“I don’t need to tell any thinking person here that we face a very serious situation,” the official said glumly. “Now is the time for you to decide for what reason you have come--whether it is to be an observer, out of curiosity, or to defend the Russian Parliament.”

As a full-blown assault on the building seemed near, Alexander Rutskoi, Russia’s vice president and an Afghan war hero, told civilians to back off 50 yards from the white stone building--popularly known as the “White House” and now the center of resistance to the coup.

At about 1 a.m., Rutskoi ordered Russian police and the units of Soviet soldiers who had rallied to Yeltsin’s support and were inside the building to open fire if necessary.

Yeltsin’s Speech

Yeltsin, addressing 50,000 supporters massed outside his headquarters earlier Tuesday, demanded the arrest of the eight-member “junta” and said the rightists, and not his fellow radicals and democrats, were to blame for the country’s crippling ills.

“Was it not (Prime Minister Valentin S.) Pavlov who brought prices and inflation to such a level that the people are impoverished and hungry?” the Russian president asked, sheltering behind bulletproof shields. “Does not (Defense Minister Dmitri T.) Yazov have blood on his hands, the blood of the people of other republics? Does not (Interior Minister Boris K.) Pugo have bloodied hands from the the people of other republics?”

Thousands of rank-and-file Muscovites converged on the Russian government building as they learned of the danger of an attack. Hearing rumors that the assault was already under way, people began to run--toward the building.

“We must protect our government!” said one middle-aged man with a briefcase.

Standing arm in arm several ranks deep, Russians ringed the huge building while their comrades stood atop barricades. People who blocked entrances were handed gas masks but were unarmed.

“We hope that they will not shoot, because we are here,” said one link in the living chain, 28-year-old graduate student Marina Kondratyeva.

Three lines of barricades were thrown up on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, named for the one-eyed general who bested Napoleon in the Russian campaign of 1812. First came bumper-to-bumper vehicles, then the Soviet tanks who pledged their allegiance to Russia, then trolley buses.

Inside the building, where Yeltsin hunkered down for the night, police with automatic rifles, special Interior Ministry forces and army reservists and uniformed soldiers stood vigil.

Col. Alexander A. Ipatov, one of a score or so of pro-Yeltsin soldiers trying to keep track of Soviet military movements from a third-floor office in the building, said a tank battalion of about 70 men had definitely come over to Russian forces.

Several tanks from the Taman Motorized Rifle Division also stood guard outside Russia’s headquarters.

“We’re defending our countrymen,” said a 22-year-old lieutenant. “If tanks approach that support the coup, we will keep the building under our control. We are here to protect the building and Yeltsin.”

The paratroop commander said to have ordered his men into Moscow to defend elected Russian authorities, a Lt. Gen. Grachev, was reportedly arrested, the Russian Information Agency said, citing “reliable sources.” However, the Defense Ministry stridently denied in a statement that its officers had mutinied.

The ‘Illnesses’

Unexpectedly, “Vremya,” state-run TV’s evening newscast, announced Tuesday that Pavlov, the Soviet prime minister, had suffered an attack of high blood pressure on Monday, the day of the power seizure, and was bedridden and receiving medical care. He was replaced by his deputy, Vitaly K. Doguzhiev.

Yazov, who as defense minister would coordinate the deployment of troops to back the coup, was supposedly taken ill and replaced, said Vladimir Lukin, chairman of the Russian Parliament’s foreign relations commission, but the report could not be confirmed.

Interfax, an independent news agency with good Kremlin sources, said that not only had Yazov been replaced by Gen. Mikhail A. Moiseyev, the military chief of staff, but that KGB Chairman Vladimir A. Kryuchkov as well had resigned from the committee.

That sensational Interfax report, however, was flatly denied by Communist Party officials.

Another high-level Soviet official, not a member of the ruling committee, was also reported ill. A Foreign Ministry official said that Foreign Minister Alexander A. Bessmertnykh had taken “sick” after returning from vacation, “but was expected to return to work in a few days.”

Across the Nation

In many cities Tuesday there were anti-coup demonstrations that brought a total of hundreds of thousands of people into the streets, and protest strikes began from Siberia to the Ukraine.

Even many of Yeltsin’s allies and supporters, however, ignored his call on Monday for a general strike.

Alexei II, patriarch of Moscow and All Russia and the spiritual father of Russian Orthodoxy, said people were “bewildered” by the State Emergency Committee’s dubious legal status. “At the present moment it is necessary to hear the voice of President Gorbachev,” the prelate declared.

Because of bad communications with the provinces, it was seldom possible to independently verify reports pouring into Moscow, but Russian authorities were claiming that about 70% of the cities and towns in the republic were supporting Yeltsin.

In Leningrad, the country’s second-largest city and cradle of Russia’s 1917 Communist revolution, a crowd estimated by police at up to 300,000 jammed Palace Square to denounce the rightists’ actions, and the City Council declared them “null and void.”

Arkady Kramarev, chief of Leningrad’s police, said his men support Yeltsin. The local KGB chief told Mayor Anatoly A. Sobchak by telephone that he would obey only Leningrad and Russian authorities, Sobchak reported.

In Moscow, the Presidium of the City Council appealed to soldiers, from privates to generals, not to heed the rightists’ orders.

“Brothers! The old party leaders are making a desperate attempt to hold onto their powers and privileges at any cost,” the Moscow leaders said. “Those who luxuriated in their villas and mansions now want to drown in blood those who fight for their right to own land and live like human beings. . . . Once again, they want to deceive you just as they did in Afghanistan. Don’t start a civil war, don’t open fire, don’t become the executioners of your own people.”

However, some additional government and Communist Party figures came out in support of the committee, which said it was taking power to arrest the dizzying decline of the Soviet economy and save the nation from chaos.

“Democracy without order and discipline can do people no good,” declared Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov, who said Gorbachev’s six-year-old policy of perestroika had ended in a “deadlock.”

“Already the first day of emergency showed that in some parts of the U.S.S.R., people sighed with relief,” the Emergency Committee said in a statement reviewing the results ot its first day in power.

In the coal-rich Kemerovo region of Siberia, home to some of the most radical and anti-Communist workers in the country, 41 industries--from mine shafts to a poultry plant--were striking in response to Yeltsin’s demand for a work stoppage that would bring the rightists to their knees.

“We declare that there must be no support to criminals,” the Kuzbass Council of Workers Committees said, throwing its support wholeheartedly to Yeltsin’s government. “We have legally constituted Russian authorities.”

In Byelovo, the city council called on the populace to launch a civil disobedience campaign.

In Moldova, the southern republic that had wanted no part of Gorbachev’s plan for a decentralized Soviet Union, 400,000 people reportedly rallied to demand that he be reinstated.

Meanwhile, Russia’s foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, was dispatched to Washington empowered by the republic’s leaders to deal directly with President Bush.

Tough Demands

In a list of toughly worded demands handed to Anatoly I. Lukyanov, chairman of the Supreme Soviet legislature, during a hastily arranged meeting with Russian government envoys, Yeltsin demanded a face-to-face audience with Gorbachev within 24 hours.

Gennady I. Yanayev, the Soviet vice president, succeeded Gorbachev on Monday as acting president, claiming that the vacationing leader was ill. Pressed by reporters for details, Yanayev would say only in the vaguest of terms that Gorbachev was “tired.”

Russian leaders demanded that medical experts from the World Health Organization be given access to Gorbachev within three days. If a checkup shows Gorbachev to be in good health, then he must be immediately reinstated, Yeltsin said.

He and the other members of the Russian leadership demanded the lifting of all restrictions on Russian mass media, the withdrawal of troops, the abolition of the state of emergency until a special session of the Russian Parliament, to begin today, can be held and the dissolving of the State Emergency Committee and the annulment of all its acts.

There was still no definite or credible word about Gorbachev’s whereabouts or indeed whether the Soviet leader, who had been in the Crimea, is even alive.

Lukyanov told the Russian delegation carrying Yeltsin’s demands that “Mikhail Gorbachev’s condition is still grave.” But many Soviets regarded with great suspicion Lukyanov’s relationship to Monday’s coup.

“He has been next to them (the committee members), but a man in the shadows,” Yeltsin told Echo of Moscow radio, which went back on the air Tuesday and was broadcasting from hiding.

Times staff writer Carey Goldberg contributed to this story.