The drawings corpus by the architect Sigismund Vladislavovich Dombrovsky (1883-1953), whose later work has formed a substantial part of the SverdlovskYekaterinburg urban space, is being examined. The authors reconstruct the sociocultural and emotional context of March 1918, when S. V. Dombrovsky created a large number of sketches of monuments to the fighters of the revolution and monumental “educational” objects before the appearance of the Leninist plan of monumental propaganda. The necessity of semiotic analysis of the architect`s iconography as a way of understanding the creative motives during the era of political and socioeconomic uncertainty is shown.