the truth was that conan burke was a clever communist agitator in the pay of the russians , an undercover marxist-leninist infiltrator who had been paid by the soviet government to reignite the smouldering embers of proletarian spain , to rekindle the flames that had burnt so brightly during the spanish civil war , when the revolution had been set alight by the blazing oratory of local bolsheviks in the 1930s .