>have most doctors per capita in the world

Along this claim is the comment that “ The Soviet Union had the highest physician-patient ratio in the world, my notes say 42 per 10,000 population, vs 24 in Denmark and Sweden, 19 in US.” The first source for this claim is Red Medicine: Socialized Health in Soviet Russia by Englishman Sir Arthur Newsholme. It is important to note that this was published in 1933, which limits the veracity of its claims to only a very small period of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, a page number is not given for the claim, but I was able to find a number of figures. In Chapter 11 we see in a footnote that:

According to Dr. Roubakine, in 1930 there were about 30,000 female and about 39,000 male doctors in the U.S.S.R.

Which amounts to 69,000 doctors. This data set places Soviet population in 1930 at 157,700,000. This works out to 4.3 doctors per 10,000 people. Interestingly, the source list for the greentext says that Denmark and Sweden had 24 doctors per 10,000 people, which is clearly higher than 4.3.

In Chapter 17:

We were informed by Dr. Vladimirsky, Commissar of Health of the R.S.F.S.R., that in 1932 there were 36,000 medical students, and it was hoped that by 1937 the present deficiency of doctors would be overtaken. He estimated that Russia was still short of 20,000 physicians, as compared with the quota of the Five Year Plan, and that this meant retardation of public health and of medicine. It was officially considered that eventually as an ideal there should be one doctor to 1,000 population. [emphasis mine]

From this we can deduce that the R.S.F.S.R had not reached its goal, set by the Five Year Plan, and the eventual goal was 1 doctor per 1,000 people, or 10 doctors to every 10,000 people had therefore not been met.

In Chapter 18 we hear that:

In Russia, before the Revolution, there were approximately 26,000 physicians. In 1931, according to Dr. Roubakine, the total number of physicians was about 76,000.

Using our previous source, 1931 has a population of 160,600,000. This leads to 4.7 doctors per 10,000 people. How does this compare to other countries at the time? According to statistics in Exclusions: Practicing Prejudice in French Law and Medicine, 1920–1945 (page 35), in 1931 France had one doctor for every 1,645 inhabitants, or 6 doctors per 10,000 people. Exclusions goes on to state that in a study of doctors per capita across 18 countries, France ranked twelfth. This means that in 1931, at the very least, the USSR had less doctors per capita than Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, Japan, Latvia, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Germany, the Netherlands, and France.

Returning to Red Medicine, a shortage of doctors is mentioned in the introduction:

…it was everywhere frankly stated that their arrangements were not yet complete, that the dearth of doctors made more adequate provisions difficult for a few years; and when we were told openly of the great difficulties which were being experienced in extending the medical provisions of cities to the vast rural communities of Russia, and of the only partial success hitherto achieved in overcoming these difficulties…

And again in Chapter One :

It was extremely helpful to us to meet Dr. Vladimirsky and to hear his survey of the present medical situation in Russia, including a reminder that because of the shortage of physicians there had necessarily been delay in progress according to plan.

It is interesting that throughout the book, Newsholme consistently defers to communist party officials for statistics and facts, rather than any first hand investigation. To me this is reminiscent of Walter Duranty whose coverage of Holodomor was eventually denounced by the New York Times as “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.” At the very least, Newsholme seems somewhat aware of the risk of propaganda, and he notes in the introduction “We realized all the time that we were seeing the best that the U.S.S.R. had succeeded in developing.”

The second provided source for this claim is this journal article, which states:

Emergency medical care is rendered by emergency stations (departments). As of January 1, 1983, 4,627 stations were functioning, staffed by some 40,000 physicians…

I do not believe this is the correct figure to be cited, as it only looks at emergency stations. Furthermore, with an estimated population of 270,000,000 in 1982 this leads to only 1.4 physicians per 10,000 people. Although data is hard to find on this stat, World Bank data shows many countries having over ten times this rate as early as the 1960s.

However, in the journal following the cited article is another journal article which finally includes a useful statistic, from 1984:

There are approximately 700,000 physicians in the Soviet Union, resulting in a physician/patient ratio of 266/100,000, compared with 158/100,000 in the U.S.

26.6 physicians per 10,000 people is half the 42 physicians to 10,000 people noted in the comment, and I am unsure of where that number came from. So was 26.6 physicians per 10,000 the highest in the world? Data from the Israeli Medical Association places Israel as having >30 physicians per 10,000 people in 1984.