Yushchenko was elected on a vow to clean house, and since his first weeks in office a war has raged across Ukraine, a campaign against corruption. At times the battle has threatened to spill blood; at times it has risked turning to farce. As I traveled the country the summer after Yushchenko took office, the corrupt powers that upheld the Kuchma regime were under fire in many of their old haunts. Indeed, in a corner of western Ukraine bordered by four countries—Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania—a foot soldier of the revolution had already won a battle against the regional boss.

Yuriy Rakhovsky heads up the Ministry of Internal Affairs office in Uzhhorod, a border city thick with traders and uncertain wares. Standing well over six feet tall, Rakhovsky is a dark coil of muscle and anxiety. When he speaks, in a bass staccato, jabbing the air with his forefinger, his muscles show beneath a dark blue suit. The suit is new, a concession to his recent promotion. Before the revolution Rakhovsky had worked as a detective. He had ambitions, of course, but becoming head honcho was not among them. Then he built a case against the man who had run Uzhhorod under Kuchma, Ivan Rizak. Now Rakhovsky is a very busy man.

On the day of my visit, I was kept waiting outside his office at police headquarters for four hours. When I was finally allowed in, Rakhovsky stood behind a broad desk at the far end of the long room, a cell phone pressed to an ear. Now and then he distractedly tapped a tank of tropical fish beside a bank of phones.

"A raid," he explained in short bursts of words. "Final preparations. A stolen truck. Hungarian contraband. Rounding up the whole gang." Unhooking a pair of cell phones from his belt, he placed them on the desk like a gunslinger unholstering his six-shooter at a poker table.

When I asked how he had snared a powerful figure like Rizak, Rakhovsky revealed a distaste for publicity. "That's a question for the governor, " he said, chuckling at the thought of Rizak sitting in prison a few blocks away. The "governor," as Rizak was called, stood accused of half a dozen crimes, including graft and "leading a man to suicide."That man was 61-year-old Volodymyr Slyvka, dean of Uzhhorod National University and two-time laureate of the state prize for science. Rizak, it was alleged, had pressured the dean to force the 13,000 student body to vote for Kuchma's chosen successor, Viktor Yanukovych, an ex-prime minister from the east who had served time in Soviet jails for assault.

"The dean had terrible relations with Rizak," Rakhovsky explained. "Once he was out of the way, the governor replaced him with his own man, but the students still voted for Yushchenko.”

How had the dean committed suicide? I asked. "That's the strange thing," Rakhovsky said. "No bullet, no rope. Just cuts—many, many knife cuts."According to press reports, Slyvka's wife found him in the bath, his veins cut and a kitchen knife in his chest.