The JVA Cleveland Archive is a community-driven oral history and archive project committed to chronicling, preserving, and sharing the untold stories of Soviet refugees who resettled in the Cleveland area between 1976 and 1991, from the Jackson-Vanik Amendment (JVA) to the end of the Soviet Union. During this time, an estimated 12,000 Soviet refugees settled here.

Many immigrants who fled the USSR due to political oppression and religious persecution settled in Beachwood, South Euclid, Cleveland Heights, Mayfield Heights, and other East Side neighborhoods. Before arriving in the U.S., they were migrants in Italy and Austria. However, their personal histories, photographs, and documents remain largely unarchived. This project allows them to own and tell their own stories. Many adults who undertook this migration with their families are seniors now, making this project all the more urgent.

We would like to host a Community Archiving Day, inviting these residents and their families to bring old photos, immigration documents, and personal mementos to be digitized at photo and scanning stations. Bilingual volunteers will conduct short oral history interviews on-site, which will all be preserved on a public website. In the next stage of this project, we plan to hold a pop-up exhibition at a local library or community center to share these stories and personal ephemera. The long-term goal of this project is archival and classification within a larger organization dedicated to preservation and history.

What makes this project unique:
- Includes Soviet émigrés of all backgrounds and ethnicities.

- Encourages the participation of and engagement with working class immigrants, not selecting for professionals or academics.
- Seeks to include businesses central to the community.
- Focuses on the time directly before, during, and shortly after immigration.
- Taps into this somewhat insular community using interviewers from the community.