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In Russia the Jesuit method was introduced into all church seminaries by tsarist fiat, and continued until the virtual dissolution of the Orthodox Church in Russia under the atheistic soviets. A few seminaries were permitted to continue under very closely supervised and reduced circumstances. These continued to follow the rigorous militaristic seventeenth century Jesuit method. Students lived in barracks with no heating. In winter, most of Russia has snow with temperatures regularly dropping to minus 40 degrees centigrade and to minus 60 in parts of Siberia. Educational discipline was spartan, health breaking, and capricious.
When Bishop [[Hilarion (Alfeyev) of Vienna |Hilarion of Vienna]] and Austria wrote his influential outline for the reform of Russian seminaries in 1999 [[Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, ''Orthodox Witness Today'', WCC Publications, Geneva, 2006]], the 17th century Jesuit method was still the norm in Russia.
At the same time, the other great Orthodox world centres were all suffering the after effects of atheistic communism’s depredations, purges, closures, destructions, and slaughters; or similar actions under the Ottoman Turks, the Seljuk Turks, the Islamic Marmalukes, the Islamic Fatimids, the French Catholics in Lebanon and Syria; and later the Islamic Arab states.
