BUDAPEST — A statue of Imre Nagy, who was prime minister during the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule, has stood since 1996 in Martyrs’ Square, adjacent to the country’s National Assembly in Budapest.

Now, it’s gone.

This month, the National Memorial Commission, led by a member of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s far-right Fidesz Party, decided to remove the statue of Mr. Nagy, who was executed two years after the uprising by a Soviet-backed puppet government.

The statue of Mr. Nagy, who was at once a reformist and a dedicated communist, is expected to be moved and replaced with a memorial to the victims of the Red Terror, a purge of anti-communist forces in 1919. The commission is led by the National Assembly’s speaker, Laszlo Kover, a member of Fidesz.

The Red Terror memorial was originally erected under the regency of Admiral Miklos Horthy, who was Hungary’s de facto leader from 1920 to 1944, a period during which severe legal restrictions were placed on Hungarian Jews.

The removal of Mr. Nagy’s statue is part of a broader push by Mr. Orban to resurrect Hungary’s right-wing authoritarian past, said Peter Kreko, director of Political Capital, a Budapest-based political think tank and consultancy.

“It’s the re-establishment of the symbolic politics of the Horthy era,” Mr. Kreko said, adding that the restoration of public areas around Parliament to reflect their appearance between the two world wars was a sign that the country’s political leadership was seeking to build on Admiral Horthy’s heritage.

It was not clear where the Nagy statue would go. Press reports said it would be placed on Jaszai Mari square, about a mile north of its former location, but a representative for the government could not be reached for comment.

The decision to relocate it drew fierce opposition from many Hungarians who revere Mr. Nagy as a national hero and have pushed back against Mr. Orban’s efforts to create what he calls an illiberal democracy.

“It outrageous that they removed Nagy’s statue, and it is scandalous that they would remove this statue under the cloak of darkness in a manner the people would not see,” said Ferenc Eross, 72, a retiree. “Imre Nagy bothers them because he was the prime minister of a revolution, instead of a system like the kind we have here today.”

Since ascending to the office of prime minister for a second time in 2010, Mr. Orban has sought to remake Hungarian society through what European Union leaders have described as sweeping anti-democratic changes: rewriting the national constitution, reshaping the judiciary and shifting the electoral system to favor Fidesz.

The far-right leader is also reshaping Hungary’s cultural and civil society, and its education system. He has used the Hungarian-American Jewish philanthropist George Soros as a foil, accusing him of seeking to undermine Hungary’s sovereignty, and Parliament approved legislation to force the closing of a university founded by the financier. This year, Mr. Soros’s Open Society Foundations, under increasing pressure, left Hungary.

“The government’s goal,” Laszlo Miklosi, president of the Association of Hungarian History Teachers, has said, “is to create a version of history preferable to Orban.”

Mr. Nagy, who during the revolution broke with the Warsaw Pact and called on the West to recognize Hungary as a neutral state, was executed for treason in 1958. He and other leading figures in the uprising were buried in Budapest under fake names, as the government sought to erase the memory of 1956, and he came to symbolize the Soviets’ oppression of Hungary for generations.

Hungary, an ally of Nazi Germany during World War II, became a satellite state of the Soviet Union after the war. A Soviet-backed puppet government was installed, and authorities violently clamped down.

The 1956 uprising was set off by university students, who demanded, among other things, a free press, free and fair multiparty elections, just compensation of workers, and freedom of expression, all things that resonate with many of Mr. Orban’s opponents.

“He was a part of Hungarian history and they shouldn’t remove him from it by removing this statue,” Marta Karpeta, 65, a retiree. “He took a stand against what was happening, and he took the lead when it mattered. And because of this he died the death of a martyr. He had to die for what he believed in.”

Mr. Kover defended the decision to move the statue, accusing the left-wing opposition of continuing what he called the former Communist government’s “historical forgery,” in an interview with a pro-government news website.

Decades after the failed uprising, and as the Soviet Union began to crumble, Hungary’s democratic opposition seized the opportunity to rehabilitate the former prime minister’s image.

On June 16, 1989, more than 100,000 Hungarians attended a public reburial of Mr. Nagy, a historic event that signified the end of Soviet oppression in Hungary. A young Mr. Orban delivered a speech that propelled him onto the national political stage.

“Now, 33 years after the Hungarian uprising,” said Mr. Orban, demanding that Soviet troops pull out of Hungary, “and 31 years after the execution of Hungary’s last responsible prime minister, we can peacefully reach all those things the ’56 revolutionaries fought for in bloody battles.”

Palko Karasz contributed reporting from London.

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