In the 16th century, with the efforts of Metropolitan of Kiev Josyf Veliamyn Rutsky and Archbishop of Polotsk Josaphat Kuntsevych, the monastic order was revived on territory of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Basil and St. Theodore Studite, previously undergoing a period of laxity and decline, were reformed by the initiative of Josaphat Kuntsevych and Joseph Benjamin Rutsky, beginning with the monastery of the Holy Trinity in Vilnius.

Following this reform in 1617 the individual monasteries united into a single congregation under a Protarchimandrite directly subject to the Metropolitan, similar to the path Western Rite monasticism took during the Middle Ages.

The Order of Saint Basil the Great spread and flourished across modern day Belarus and Ukraine and played a key role in the education both of laity and clergy, and helped to preserve the distinctiveness of the Ruthenian culture in the predominantly Polish and Roman Catholic Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth until the partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th century.

With permission from Pope Leo XIII the Basilian Constitution was updated with help from the Society of Jesus starting with the Dobromyl monastery, by which it became less sedentary and more missionary, among other things allowing the monks to work with the Ukrainian diaspora overseas.

Nonetheless, the Order survived among the Ukrainian diaspora in the free world (and in communist Yugoslavia where the regime was relatively benign) and in Ukraine itself where the monks secretly prayed and catechized.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Order was reestablished in independent Ukraine and other Central and Eastern European countries such as Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Portugal.