Short answers, pulled from the story.
Sergei Bondarchuk directed the 1965-1967 Soviet War and Peace, and also starred in it as Pierre Bezukhov. He was confirmed as director by Soviet Minister of Culture Yekaterina Furtseva in late February 1961.
The final cost of War and Peace was 8,291,712 roubles, equal to US$9,213,013 at the 1967 exchange rate, or approximately $60-70 million in 2021 accounting for rouble inflation. It remains the most expensive film ever produced in the Soviet Union.
War and Peace sold approximately 135 million tickets in the USSR. The first installment, Andrei Bolkonsky, alone sold 58.3 million tickets in its first fifteen months of release and was the most successful Soviet film of 1966.
War and Peace won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 41st Academy Awards, held on the 14th of April 1969. It was the first Soviet film to win that prize.
Ludmila Savelyeva played Natasha Rostova. Bondarchuk chose the 19-year-old ballerina over more established actresses; she had recently graduated from Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet. Readers of the publication Sovetskii Ekran voted her best actress of 1966 for the role.
13,500 soldiers and 1,500 horsemen participated in filming the Battle of Borodino sequence. Bondarchuk told National Geographic in 1986 that Western press claims of 120,000 participants were exaggerations, stating his actual figure was 12,000.