Short answers, pulled from the story.
Georgy Vasilyevich Sviridov was a Soviet and Russian composer, born on the 16th of December 1915 in Fatezh in the Kursk Governorate and died on the 6th of January 1998 in Moscow. He is best known for his choral music, shaped by Russian Orthodox Church chant, and for vocal works setting texts by Russian poets including Pushkin, Blok, and Yesenin.
The nightly Soviet news broadcast Vremya used a short excerpt from Sviridov's score for the 1965 film Time, Forward! as its opening theme. The piece became one of the most widely recognized musical signatures in Soviet daily life, heard by millions who did not know the composer's name.
Sviridov received the Stalin Prize in 1946 for his Piano Trio, the Lenin Prize in 1960 for his Oratorio Pathetique, and the USSR State Prize in 1968 and again in 1980. He was named People's Artist of the USSR, became a Hero of Socialist Labor in 1975, and was twice awarded the Order of Lenin.
The "Winter Road" movement from Sviridov's suite The Blizzard was the subject of a plagiarism allegation, claiming that composer Tappi Iwase used the melody as the theme for the Metal Gear Solid series. Following the allegation, the theme was removed from the fourth installment of the series onward.
Sviridov set texts by Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Blok, Sergei Yesenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Fyodor Tyutchev, Boris Pasternak, Nikolay Nekrasov, Robert Rozhdestvensky, and Alexander Prokofyev, among others. He also composed settings of Robert Burns in Russian translation and of William Shakespeare.
Asteroid 4075 Sviridov is a minor planet named in honor of Georgy Sviridov, the Soviet and Russian composer. It was discovered in 1982 by the Russian astronomer Lyudmila Karachkina.