Washington ? If they succeed in throwing the bums out of office in Kiev on Dec. 26, Ukraine’s reform politicians will be doing the world an enormous service.

For a decade, Leonid Kuchma’s regime has been an important cog in a loosely connected international criminal enterprise that has operated behind a cloak of national sovereignty and banking secrecy to traffic in weapons, commercial corruption and political murder.

Dismantling the Kuchma organization would help further expose the international dimension and connections of law-breaking lawmakers who are losing ground as nations shake off the lingering inhibitions of the Cold War environment that excused official criminality in the name of ideology.

The struggle in Ukraine is important as a political confrontation between democrats and autocrats, and because of the potential for secessionist battles between pro- and anti-Kremlin factions in the former Soviet republic.

But at its most fundamental level, this struggle is between organized crime as practiced by and on behalf of officeholders and a citizenry’s desire for the protections and benefits of an impartial legal system.

The poisoning attempt on the life of reform candidate Viktor Yushchenko has made the criminal component of this political struggle crystal clear. The public revulsion it has created should add impetus to the quest to make rulers, national governments and international institutions accountable. From Chile to Ukraine and elsewhere, the rule of law is having a good December.

l Augusto Pinochet is finally being brought to account in Santiago and in Washington, where an investigation into the dictator’s secret bank accounts has exposed one of the essential tools of high-level international chicanery.

l Traian Basescu, a former sea captain who campaigned on promises to end endemic corruption and malfeasance in Romania, won Sunday’s presidential election against the establishment candidate.

l Controversy over the oil-for-food program that lined the pockets of Iraq’s dictator and his foreign helpers is focusing a useful spotlight on lax management and inherent conflicts of interest at the United Nations, where much flagrant criminal behavior by member governments is routinely ignored.

The crooks and their protectors are not likely to go quietly. But some of those involved in what I hope is becoming a global wave of reform see themselves as both consolidating and benefiting from a permanent change in international relations that was triggered by the global reaction to Sept. 11, 2001.

Oleh Rybachuk, Yushchenko’s chief of staff, is one the reformers who believe just that.

“After Sept. 11, there is no effective banking secrecy any more for these guys to hide behind,” Rybachuk said during a visit to Washington last week. A new emphasis on law enforcement to fight terrorism will hamper other cross-border skullduggery, he said, adding even more optimistically: “Evil always destroys itself.”

It is good to hope so. But let us take it no more for granted than do Rybachuk and Yushchenko, who have been tirelessly campaigning to win the Dec. 26 runoff that replaces last month’s fraudulent vote, which triggered the massive street protests in Kiev.

In the former Soviet Union’s former sphere of influence, criminality remains the primary function of government for those unable to break the habits of totalitarianism. Illegal radar shipments to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from Ukraine provided one example of the tightly knit arrangements that survived the collapse of communism. The unsolved killing of opposition journalist Heorhiy Gongadze in 2000 in Ukraine also bore the marks of Soviet-era secret police tactics — as does the dioxin poisoning earlier this year of Yushchenko.

Bringing an effective system based on the rule of law to Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia could have unsettling consequences for President Vladimir Putin, who sought unsuccessfully to intimidate Ukrainians into staying with the Kuchma machine. Again, Rybachuk surprised me with his optimism, saying that the Russian leader is pragmatic and that the time for change is right.

“We have good relations with Russian businessmen, who see that it is in their interests to have stability and predictability in our relations. These guys are past the wild capitalism stage,” he said. Like the robber barons of American history, they are now interested in legal structures that will protect the fortunes they have amassed.

It is a leap of faith to believe these Russian business interests can pressure Putin into accepting deep reform in Ukraine. But they should certainly try. More important will be international pressure from the United States, the European Union, Japan and others who must seize this opportunity to fight crime even when it operates under the flag and trappings of office.

— Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.