The Three Victims--Sad Irony : Profiles: One was a hippie and a poet. Another had fought in Afghanistan. The third once worked for the KGB.

At the height of tension during last week’s coup attempt, when the tens of thousands of unarmed volunteers protecting the Russian government building were being told that an attack was imminent, Ilya Krichevsky dived through the open hatch of an armored vehicle.

He hoped, his friends say, to persuade the crew not to attack peaceful demonstrators nor to follow the orders of the hard-line Communists trying to take away Russians’ hard-earned freedom. But instead, the 28-year-old architect-poet was shot to death by the paratroopers inside the vehicle.

Krichevsky--a hippie who saw the world through his poetry--was one of three victims of the renegade junta who were buried Saturday in Moscow’s Vagankovskoye cemetery as national heroes for giving up their lives for the cause of Russian freedom.

“For most of us, tanks are terrifying, but he had served in a tank division so he was not afraid of them,” said Viktor Kolikov, 34, an architect and one of Krichevsky’s closest friends. “I’m sure he just wanted to talk to the crew--to tell them that he, too, served in a tank and to persuade them not to fight against their own people.”

None of his friends or family members were surprised at his brash action.

“He had the kind of character that wouldn’t let him pass something by without taking action,” said Sergei Prokhorov, 28, a policeman who had been in Krichevsky’s close circle of friends since childhood. “He was against the regime his whole life, and it seems when he saw the tanks in the streets, he just couldn’t stand the thought of all of the reforms of the last several years going up in smoke.”

His mother, Inessa, 59, said that her son had listened to radio reports saying that armored vehicles were expected to storm the Parliament building, telling his parents before he left the house that he was just “going out on a stroll.” But actually, he was responding to a call by Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin for all able bodies to come and protect democracy.

“He hated Communists,” said his father, Marat Krichevsky, 59, who is also an architect.

A fan of heavy-metal rock music, who read and reread Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” Krichevsky lived and died, his father said, by the ideals he illustrated in his poems.

“Don’t have vain hopes,” Marat Krichevsky said, quoting from one of his son’s poems. “You will not die the way you want to die.”

His mother, an engineer, said she thought his death was a result of his emotional character.

“He was kind of a hippie,” she said. “His nature was very poetic, which, I guess, was not a very good characteristic for everyday life. He really thought he could stop the tanks.”

Lidiya Z. Medvedeva, 60, who was his home-room teacher in ninth and 10th grade, said that even as a boy, Krichevsky was committed to freedom and would never follow rules blindly.

“What I liked about him even then was that he was a free-thinker and always said what he felt,” Medvedeva said. “If he made up his mind about something, it was impossible to change his mind.”

In the same way that no one close to Krichevsky was surprised to learn that he was the one who jumped into the tank, friends of Dmitri Komar, 23, another of the victims, said he was acting predictably when he rushed to Krichevsky’s aid and ended up losing his own life.

“It was not surprising,” said Vika, 23, who had known Komar since they were in nursery school together. (Vika declined to give her last name.) “He was the kind of person who would do anything for a friend.”

Among the last soldiers to be pulled out of Afghanistan after the Kremlin ended its intervention there, Komar--like many other veterans of the Soviet Union’s equivalent of Vietnam War--had been in and out of depressions since he returned home to the military town of Istra in early 1989, where he worked in a furniture factory.

“He left to go to Afghanistan saying, ‘I will become a man there,’ but when he came back he was very moody,” said Emma Aksentyeva, 50, a history teacher who had known Komar all his life.

“It was really sad because before Afghanistan he was a very decisive and open young man,” said Tatyana Stepaniskaya, 34, a doctor and longtime friend of Komar. “But when he came back, he started to have depressions.”

Many of his friends commented on the irony that a young man who had been raised in a military family and had served in the army himself, as a paratrooper, should be killed in such a way.

“The paradox was he was a son of an military officer, he served in Afghanistan,” said Galina N. Smeyan, a neighbor.

Friends of the third victim, Vladimir Usov, 37, remarked about the same irony. Son of an admiral, a Communist Party member and a former naval officer, Usov was far from fitting the typical profile of an activist.

Although he had recently started a private brokerage business called ECOM with some of his friends, for many years he had worked for the KGB secret police in a position none of his friends or family would speak about.

“He just started working on a new private business,” said Mikhail, 36, a construction worker who had known Usov since their school days. (Mikhail did not want to give his last name.) “Until recently he worked for the Committee on State Security”--the full name of the KGB.

He quit the KGB, his friends said, “because, like everyone else, he wanted freedom.”

According to some reports, special KGB troops manned the armored vehicle under whose treads Usov died.

“And as it ended up, he died at the hands of the KGB,” Mikhail said. “It’s a paradox.”

A cousin, Larissa Zvereva, 44, said Usov was watching the tanks roll toward the Russian Parliament building from the window of his new office and could not stand by without doing something.

Usov, the only one of the three victims with a family of his own, left behind a wife and a 14-year-old daughter.