The present paper concerns the language of Sierp, a key Polish-language periodical in inter-war Soviet Ukraine. Published between 1922 and 1935, Sierp played an important propaganda and organisational role directed at the Polish minority in Ukraine. The axis of the analysis is to compare the frequency and meaning of the lexeme walka ‘fight’, which is the basic noun representing military lexis, in two text corpora: I – from the first three years of the newspaper's publication run (1922–1924), and II – from the first three years of the Stalinist era (1930–1932). The aim is therefore to verify how the shift in Bolshevik politics at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s was reflected in the language of Sierp. The research method is the corpus-assisted approach: lexicalsemantic analysis, enriched with the possibilities offered by corpus linguistics. The paper is also a spur to the study of whether the features of Soviet propaganda, as popularised in the Polishlanguage press published in the inter-war USSR, were perpetuated in the political language of post-war PRL.