BigBlueBox
Banned
I'm not asking why they would want to sell oil to Japan if the Americans wouldn't sell it to them, but rather if they could provide enough oil.
as the TSRR wasn't completely doubletracked yet as of 1941, even with Stalin having the Gulag inmates working on this from the mid '30s onwards
During WWII, over 70% of Soviet Oil was from the Baku area. After Barbarossa, most of the rail link were cut, and they didn't have enough oiltankers to move all that oil by sea.
So they came up with a novel idea, use storage tanks that held oil on land, on the Black Sea instead.
So they took several of those tanks, lashed then together with steel cable, and towed them across the Black Sea with tugboats.
Worked, as the Baku Crude was a light enough grade it was buoyant on seawater.
There was oil production in northern Sakhalin, started when Japan occupied the area after the Russian Revolutions. Japan ceded control of the territory to the USSR in the mid-1920s (under pressure from the US!); part of the deal was that Japan would get some of the oil going forward. This oil delivery to Japan was unaffected by the US-led embargo; in fact it continued right up to the Soviet declaration of war in 1945.