Nahabed Rusinian (also Roussignan) (Efkere nr Kayseri 1819 – Constantinople/Istanbul 1876), Ottoman Armenian political and social reformer, was born in central Anatolia. In the late 1820s, he moved with his family to the Ottoman capital, where he studied at an Armenian church school and excelled in French. In 1840, a trio of wealthy Armenian families, including the Balyans, sent Rusinian to Paris to continue his education. He graduated from the Collège Sainte-Barbe in 1843 and entered the Faculté de médecine the following year. Alongside his medical training, Rusinian spent his time in Paris reading and attending lectures by writers like Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Michelet, and Victor Cousin. He also witnessed the 1848 revolution, which shaped his thinking about social change, constitutionalism and popular participation in civil society. Having obtained his medical degree in 1849, he returned in 1851 to Constantinople, where he quickly began drafting plans to reform aspects of Armenian communal life. In collaboration with a group of like-minded young men, including Nigoghos Balyan, Rusinian concentrated his efforts on three main aspects: education, language and governance.

In 1853, Rusinian was appointed to the newly-established Education Council. Founded in Constantinople, this body operated under the aegis of the Armenian Apostolic Patriarchate, an institution responsible for overseeing the social, religious and political affairs of Armenian Apostolic Christians in the Ottoman Empire. The council was designed to remedy the disorderly state of Armenian education at the time by creating school curricula, preparing text books and training teachers. While the council was largely ineffective, it was in his capacity as a member that Rusinian published a grammar book for Armenian students in 1853. This book, Ughghakhosutiwn ardi hay lezuin (“Speaking the modern Armenian language correctly”) became a source of controversy in the mid-1850s and was subsequently confiscated and banned by order of the Armenian Patriarch. Rusinian had set out to simplify and standardize the grammar and spelling so as to facilitate literacy and education, but his proposals were seen as too unconventional. An 1855 almanac, in which Rusinian proposed new month names based on those of the French Republican Calendar, was also denounced.

Rusinian himself continued to use his month names and simplified grammar and spelling rules in his own work, including a 1873 translation of Victor Hugo’s play Ruy Blas and in an unpublished translation of Louis-Aimé Martin’s De l'éducation des mères de famille. Rusinian also dabbled in music. After a sojourn in Cilicia, a region over which medieval Armenian kings had once ruled, he penned a patriotic song called Kilikia, an adaptation of the popular French “Ma Normandie” (by Frédéric Bérat, 1836) which is still sung today.

Rusinian is best remembered as one of the architects of the Armenian National Constitution, which went into effect in 1863 and created new regulations to redistribute power in the administration of Ottoman Armenian communal affairs. He was also a deputy in the Armenian National Assembly, a quasi-representative governing body that the Constitution brought into being. In this capacity, he published Azgayin hanganakutiwn (“National Contribution”), a proposal for a new taxation system (which, again, would never came to fruition). Like many of the other constitutionalists, deputies and reformist-minded Ottomans of his day, Rusinian was a Freemason. He belonged to an Armenian lodge in Constantinople called Ser (“Love”).

Alongside his political work, Rusinian made his living by practising and teaching medicine. In the 1850s and 1860s, he served as private physician to the Ottoman statesman Mehmed Fuad Pasha and worked at the hospital of the Ottoman Ministry of War (Bab-ı Seraskerî Hastanesi) and at the Ottoman military high school (Askerî Lisesi). He was also a member of the Société impériale de médecine de Constantinople and sat on the editorial board of its French-language organ Gazette médicale d’Orient. From 1864 to 1872, Rusinian taught pathological anatomy at the Ottoman Imperial Medical School (Mekteb-i Tıbbiye-i Şâhâne) and from 1874 until his death in 1876, he taught French composition, logic, deontology and medical ethics at the same institution. After his death, some of his lectures from this period were translated from French into Armenian and published in 1879 in a volume called Dasagirk pilisopayutean (“A textbook of philosophy”).