As a young state, we tend to remember and honor our political leaders not as figures of history but as living, or recently living, participants in our ongoing story.

This is particularly true of our Legislature, where everyone knows someone who serves or has connections to a figure of importance: House Speaker Elmer Carvalho, Senate presidents David McClung, John Ushijima, Dickie Wong, "Doc" Hill and dozens of others.

What gets lost is that these contemporary leaders are part of a tradition that goes back to the earliest days of the monarchy and the territorial Legislature. We have a long history, even if we don't always remember it.

One fascinating and perhaps overlooked story in this history involves a certain Belarusian revolutionary, author and physician named Nicholas Russel, who managed to land in Hawai'i during a lifetime of adventure that took him from the capitals of Europe to the teeming cities of Asia.

During his time here, Russel made his mark on local politics as a founding member of the Hawaiian-based Home Rule Party and as the first president of the territorial Senate.

While his story has been largely forgotten here, it is a matter of considerable interest in Belarus, a now-independent former Soviet republic. So interesting, in fact, that a television documentary team from that young nation traveled here last week to gather information and footage about this remarkable man.

"We're going forward with the reconstruction of our history," said Alex Lukashevich, author and producer of a series on famous Belarusians for the National State Television of Belarus, Channel 1.

Belarus became independent only in 1991 and is still struggling to gain its national identity, Lukashevich said.

"The history of Belarus is not so well developed," he said. So he and his team are scouring the world for prominent Belarusians, "people of whom we can be proud."

Among them, artist Marc Chagall, Hollywood mogul Louis B. Mayer and a onetime Hawai'i politician known as Nicholas Russel.

A good accounting of Russel's life was reported in a 1977 article in the Hawaiian Journal of History by Ronald Hayashida and David Kittelson. And what a life it was!

Russel (real name Nikolai Konstantinovich Sudzilovski) was a physician ("oculist," it would say on his calling cards and advertisements), amateur scientist, historian, writer, farmer, social activist, serial monogamist (with wives in Europe, Hawai'i, Japan and who knows where else), and most of all, a dedicated lifelong political revolutionary.

While Russel never lost his abiding interest in the revolution back in his homeland (he once shared a stage with Marx and Engels in London, Hayashida and Kittelson report), he had plenty of energy to foment political change during his stay in the Islands.

Well-established as a Big Island coffee farmer and physician, Russel fell in with the Independent Home Rule Party, which was dominated by Hawaiians unhappy about the revolution of 1893 and with the antics and centralizing impulses of Democrats and Republicans in Honolulu.

Encouraged by Home Rule founder Robert Wilcox, Russel stood for and won a seat in the very first territorial Legislature. Writing fiery tracts about revolution against "the existing government of sugar planters, missionaries and other white enemies of the Hawaiian Islands," Russel took to his new legislative duties with relish.

A divided Senate elected the doctor as its first president.

Russel got busy writing laws and resolutions, but — as Hayashida and Kittelson tell it — soon became disillusioned. The role of president was primarily that of mediator and administrator, not the kind of work a revolutionary would favor.

Russel finally gave up on Hawai'i and Hawaiian politics and took his revolutionary show on the road to the Far East, working as a physician and political organizer in Japan, China and the Philippines.

But it would he a mistake to think of Russel as a footnote of Hawaiian history. He had his eye directly on issues that resonate just as vividly today as they did more than a century and a half ago.

One such issue was the plight of Hawaiians after annexation.

"The rapacious state, with white capitalists at its head, would to the utmost and unnecessarily restrain the independent kanaka," he wrote not long after the overthrow. "(It) would subject him to the iron law of the economic minimum, and would make him adapt to a very intensive economy."

Those are words one might hear today during debates over Hawaiian self-determination, the after-effects of the overthrow and the push for Hawaiian sovereignty.

Clearly, this activist had a tendency to romanticize Hawaiians and excessively demonize those who had moved into positions of power in the Islands.

But his words, and his actions, had a lasting impact on Hawai'i. It's a story worth remembering both here in our tropical Islands and back in chilly Belarus.

Jerry Burris is The Advertiser's editorial page editor.

Reach Jerry Burris at jburris@honoluluadvertiser.com.