As cipher papers go, not especially interesting. The best ones have long sections explaining each of their design decisions. This paper starts out by pointing out that GOST is much slower than AES in practice, but never acknowledges that any conventional block cipher that isn't AES is probably doomed to inferior performance (because AES is hardware accelerated).<p>It would be interesting to see a country adopt a native stream cipher instead of a block cipher as their standard. The performance of stream ciphers is more competitive, you lose the requirement to define 8-10 "official modes" (most of which are insecure), and stream ciphers are virtually always what you want anyways: in 2015, block ciphers mostly exist in order to be transformed into stream ciphers via counter mode.