“It was all gradual,” she said in an interview in her lawyer’s office. “You hope it will get better, but we now know the outcome.”

On the night in question, waking from a drunken stupor and discovering that she had cooked dinner only for herself, he began beating and choking her. Flailing about with her hands to find something to hit him with, she grabbed a knife and stabbed him in the upper chest.

“I was afraid for myself and for my children,” she said. “I reached my limit and wanted to hit him with something, anything. If I had found a toy on the table, I would have hit him with that. I didn’t even look to see what was there. It happened to be a knife.”

As he staggered away, she wiped a few blood spots off the floor so her two young daughters would not see them. She called an ambulance, but by the time it arrived with the police around 20 minutes later, Mr. Yurchik was dead.

The knife had penetrated more than four inches and severed an artery.

At trial, the prosecutor argued that Ms. Gurcheva was guilty of murder because she did not flee the apartment during the fight. It is a standard accusation in such cases.

The court ignored that her husband had stood between her and the door of their studio, and that she did not want to abandon her two young daughters to an enraged drunk. Her sentence was swift and typical: six years.

In Ms. Gurcheva’s appeal, her lawyer, Aleksandr Fomin, overcame the usual problem of a lack of witnesses by deposing the eldest of the two daughters, 4-year-old Daria.