Romania: The Death of a Dictator : Prague, Bucharest: Tale of Two Cities Amid Revolutions : East Bloc: Both overthrew regimes, but similarities end there. Czechs celebrate while Romanians mourn.

In the gloomy dusk of this city without lights, candles along the boulevards dance in the darkness.

The glow of the small flames is eerily similar to the memorial candles that mark the main streets of another city several hundred miles north and west of here, a city that also recently shook off a Communist dictatorship--Prague.

But beyond the surface comparison, there are far more differences than similarities between the candles of Bucharest and those of Prague, just as there are more differences than similarities between the two cities and between the Czechoslovak and Romanian revolutions.

Prague’s candles are large, long-burning and multicolored, tended constantly by the cheerful and dignified crowds that nightly fill the city streets.

Bucharest’s candles are small, thin and yellow, a longer version of the sort of candle one would place on a child’s birthday cake. They burn quickly, and along the deserted thoroughfares of this city, few people stop to replace them when they expire.

Prague’s candles are accompanied by bouquets of multicolored flowers. In Bucharest, where flowers in winter are rare, the memorials are surrounded by bread and fruit--an Eastern Orthodox ritual offering of memoriam.

But the most obvious difference is also the most profound: Prague’s candles mark spots where anti-government demonstrators were beaten. In Bucharest, the candles burn for the dead.

In Prague this past month, residents lined up in stores selling Christmas presents. In Bucharest, residents routinely line up for essential food.

Ordinarily, that problem would have been severely worsened by the warfare of the last four days. In almost any civil disturbance, particularly one as massive as the fighting here, the food distribution system is the first casualty.

It is, therefore, an astonishing measure of how badly Nicolae Ceausescu squeezed his country that over the past four days of fighting, food supplies in the city actually have improved.

“There is more food out in shops and stores than I’ve seen in a year and a half,” said a Western diplomat, explaining that Ceausescu had withheld huge amounts of food from the domestic market to boost exports and earn hard currency to finance his massive construction projects.

On Tuesday, with Ceausescu gone, grocers could be seen selling bottles of milk and cartons of eggs from makeshift distribution points along major streets. Both items in the past were scarce and sometimes unavailable.

Over the years of Ceausescu’s rule, Romanians developed a saying--”searching for oranges”--the rough equivalent of the American expression “wild goose chase.”

On Tuesday, oranges once again were for sale in Bucharest stores.

But, while food supplies here are improving, many other commodities--from antibiotics to gasoline--remain in short supply.

The gasoline shortages contribute heavily to the emptiness of Bucharest after darkness falls, about 4:30 on winter afternoons. And that emptiness, in turn, reinforces the somberness of the city’s mood.

In other East European capitals, the last months have been a time of joy, allayed only slightly by concern about the future. Here, by contrast, the mood has been tense. The celebration over the fall of Ceausescu’s dictatorship has been heavily dampened by the price in lives that Romanians have paid for their freedom.

This is a city with virtually no street lights or night life. Only a few major boulevards are lighted, and at night, the city takes on the look of a town prepared for an air-raid blackout. People have few reasons to be out after dark, even without the continued threat from snipers and the frequently broadcast government warnings that civilians should remain indoors.

In contrast with the crowded traffic of other European capitals, there are few cars on Bucharest streets. The price of an automobile is far beyond the means of most Romanians. Also, gasoline has been strictly rationed here for years, and in the last few days, the new authorities have appealed to residents to restrict driving further to avoid fuel shortages.

With few lights and almost no cars on the street, and with shooting now largely over, the quiet darkness makes Bucharest seem like a country town, belying the statistics that show it to be a city of 2 million people.

But the many hours of winter darkness seem appropriate for the mood of Romanians who have only now begun to emerge from a long spiritual night. People here have broken some of the bonds of fear that long held them captive, but many of the habits ingrained by decades of totalitarian rule remain intact.

Some Romanians are happy now to greet foreigners, with whom they were largely forbidden to talk under the Ceausescu regime. But many eye all strangers warily, stopping on the sidewalk briefly to stare--but hastening quickly away before a conversation can begin.

“There’s such a level of paranoia and distrust that people have built up with each other, it will be very difficult to overcome,” a Western diplomat said.

Even those Romanians who have gone the furthest--inviting foreigners to their homes, for example--are slow to abandon habits of wariness.

On one such recent visit, the hosts asked their visitors not to speak English in the halls of their apartment building and quickly closed the windows and drew the drapes when the foreigners arrived.

Romanians working as translators for American reporters often are reluctant to enter the hotels where foreigners stay, explaining, when pressed, that the hotels in the past have employed many informers for the secret police.

And, while many aspects of Ceausescu’s dictatorship disappeared with him, other parts of the repressive machinery remain. The government agency that controls passports has told Western diplomats it has received no instructions to change its policies. Until new instructions arrive, most Romanians still will be forbidden to travel abroad.