The article deals with a speech communicative success production on the base of serious social experience, created for a wide audience and perceived by it. One of the most tragic events in Russian history is the Great Patriotic War while the name of K. M. Simonov today ranks arguably first among "military" poets. That is why one of his most popular poems was chosen as the research object. The work involves examining target settings of Simonov's poem "If your house is dear to you..." ("Kill him!") and determining means and methods of realizing its speech potential. The linguistic analysis of the poem's text allowed revealing the use of such speech impact methods as implicit introduction of new information, deliberate violation of speech taboos, appealing to basic human needs, shaping of the "enemy image" through modal and fining transformations, and a number of lexical and grammatical means, conveying a distinct speech-reactive charge.