Wish I never see this place again....Popov Island

The postcard below is clearly a souvenir. The franking makes no sense and the reverse is filled with a long message, with no addressee or destination, let alone further postmarks. So my best guess is that it was sent in an envelope as a souvenir postcard from a very, very sad place: Popov Island in Arkhangel'sk province.

If only it had gone through the mails! December 1918? Here's a closer look at the postmark:

Popov Island is still around although it seems to have changed its name a few times. It's close to Kem and for awhile it was home to one of the sadder places on earth: KemPerPunkt. KemPerPunkt was where you caught the ferry to the Solovetsky Islands, and if you caught that ferry after 1920 or so, chances were that you never came back, for the Solovetsky islands were home to one of the earliest and nastiest bits in the Gulag archipelago: the Solovetsky Camp of Special Purpose or SLON to use the Russian acronym (which also means "elephant" oddly enough).

But all that was still a few years in the future when this postmark was struck on a souvenir postcard...