MOSCOW – When a tearful Alexandra Ivannikova flagged down a Moscow police car in December 2003 to report an attempted rape, the last thing she expected was to be arrested. Mrs. Ivannikova had just escaped from the car of 23-year-old Sergei Bagdasaryan after stabbing him in the leg with a kitchen knife while he was trying to rape her. Earlier this month, despite her pleas that she acted in self-defense, Mrs. Ivannikova was convicted of murder.

“I had two choices: to defend myself or to submit, which is what 99% of women would do,” she told The New York Sun. “The fact that he died was awful, but it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t behaved himself in that way.”

Mrs. Ivannikova’s conviction has sparked an uproar in Russia and her trial is being seen as a landmark case on a woman’s right to self-defense. On June 2, a Moscow district court found Mrs. Ivannikova guilty of murder, even though the judge acknowledged the attempted rape. The court gave her a three-year suspended sentence and ordered her to pay $7,200 in compensation to Bagdasaryan’s family. Protests broke out outside the courtroom after the ruling, and a week later the City Prosecutor’s Office asked the court to overturn the verdict, saying “no crime was committed.” A decision on whether an appeal will be heard is expected by the end of the month.

The case has highlighted Russia’s dismal record in dealing with rape, with thousands of women assaulted every year, very few convictions, and a culture of blaming victims.

“Men feel like they can act with impunity – if they want something, they can take it,” said the executive director of the Russian Association of Crisis Centers, Natalya Abubikirova. “If a woman in Russia is raped, it’s always her own fault because she was out late at night, she was dressed provocatively, she had a few drinks, or she didn’t fight hard enough.”

About 8,000 rapes and attempted rapes were recorded in Russia last year, but Ms. Abubikirova says those figures represent only the tip of the iceberg. Support groups say only 5 to 10% of rape cases are reported to police because of shame and fear of retaliation. Only 3% of rape victims have their cases presented in court.

Mrs. Ivannikova got into Bagdasaryan’s Lada car in southern Moscow on the night of December 8, 2003, after he agreed to give her a ride home for about $4. It’s common in Moscow for residents to flag down unmarked gypsy cabs, which operate as informal taxis. She said that he immediately began making suggestive comments and later passed her house and turned into a dark side alley. She said he stopped the car, locked the doors and pulled down his pants and underwear. He demanded she perform oral sex on him, grabbed her by the hair and pulled her head toward his crotch.

“He was saying: ‘You’re lucky this is all I’m asking you to do,'” she recalled. “He said, ‘If you don’t like it I can take you to my friends and we’ll pass you around.’ … He said he would bring me out into a forest where no one would ever find me.”

Desperate, Mrs. Ivannikova said she reached into her bag and pulled out a kitchen knife. She’d been raped once before – at knifepoint at the age of 16 – and carried the weapon for protection.

“After I was raped the first time I decided that I would never let anyone abuse me again,” she told the Sun. “This is about my honor, my life, and nobody, not the police or anyone else, is going is to defend me but myself.”

She said she stabbed Bagdasaryan in the leg, managed to unlock her door and ran from the car. By the time she returned with the police, Bagdasaryan was dead. She had struck an artery in his leg and he’d bled to death in the car.

“I didn’t mean to kill him, I only wanted to get away,” she said. “If I had wanted to murder him, I would have stabbed him in the throat or the stomach or the heart.”

Nonetheless, Mrs. Ivannikova was soon on trial for murder. Her lawyer, Alexei Parshin, said prosecutors portrayed her “as a socially dangerous person who provoked the situation herself.” He told the Sun that the court simply ignored her pleas of self-defense and reproached Mrs. Ivannikova for refusing to acknowledge her guilt or apologize to Bagdasaryan’s father.

“The main problem is that the Russian legal system is designed to provide guilty verdicts,”he said. There is no presumption of innocence in the Russian court system and Russian judges are loath to hand down “not guilty” verdicts because they don’t want to appear soft on crime. At least 97% of Russian criminal cases end in convictions.

Which is why Mrs. Ivannikova said she was stunned to hear that the Prosecutor’s Office is asking for her conviction to be overturned. She believes the huge public outcry led to the about-face. Still, there are no guarantees that the court’s decision will be overruled or that she won’t go to jail. Lawyers for Bagdasaryan’s family are also appealing the verdict, saying the sentence was too lenient and that the decision to give her a suspended sentence was politically motivated.

Despite what she’s going through, Mrs. Ivannikova, who is married and has a 4-month-old baby, hopes some good will eventually come of the case.

She said her case has raised awareness of rape and may even lead to changes in Russia’s criminal code. After meeting with her lawyer, a group of deputies in the Russian Parliament are planning to put forward legal amendments that would allow women to claim the right to self-defense in rape cases. In order to plead self-defense, Mrs. Ivannikova had to prove that she felt her life was in danger.

She told the Sun that she regrets Bagdasaryan’s death, but has no second thoughts about what she did.

“It’s such a burden to know that your actions led to somebody’s death, nobody can imagine what that’s like. For a long time, I felt like a zombie. It wasn’t important if I ate or not, I walked around without seeing anything and would just sit and stare at nothing,” she said. “But I know that I didn’t have choice…. This isn’t just about me anymore, it’s about everybody, about women not being afraid to defend themselves.”