The article is concerned with the history of the existence and symbolic transformation of the lattice of the garden of the Winter Palace throughout the 20th century. The fence erected by the will of Empress Alexandra Fedorovna became a symbol of the Russian monarchy. The tragic events that unfolded in the immediate vicinity of the fence on January 9, 1905 “connected” the lattice and the First Russian Revolution into a single commemorative space. After the revolution of 1917 the lattice was disfigured (double-headed eagles and monograms were broken) and was installed on the working outskirts. The author tried to understand why that was happened, and turned to the analysis of archival paperwork and reconstructed the history of another attempt at symbolic transformation of the lattice in the mid-1920s. The lattice is a semantically complex monument, the struggle of various actors for the “recoding” of which continued throughout the 20th century. Both research methods traditional for historical science are used, as well as those associated with the concept of “symbolic politics”, including the comparison method of B. Forest and D. Johnson, who consider monuments as symbolic capital for which political actors are fighting. Drawings of the monogram filling of the lattice are first introduced into the historical science.