Only a few hundred people were present to commemorate the anniversary of the execution of Imre Nagy on Sunday morning in Budapest, a far cry from 30 years ago when his reburial drew more than 100,000 people to the city’s Heroes Square.

Nagy, a communist reformer, had wanted to implement a less hardline version of communism, but Moscow sent in tanks in 1956 to crush the revolt. He was arrested and hanged on 16 June 1958.

His reburial, on the same day in 1989, would come to be seen as perhaps the key event that heralded the end of communism in Hungary. It was also the first time in which a fiery young liberal politician, Viktor Orbán, entered the limelight, giving a rousing oration on the square calling for the Soviet army to leave Hungary.

“It was a great day in Hungarian history and the history of the whole of Europe, a great day for the friends of freedom,” said Adam Michnik, a Polish former dissident and now the editor-in-chief of Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, who watched the speeches in Heroes Square in 1989.

“Imre Nagy was a symbol for us, a symbol of the Hungarian striving for freedom. When I was standing there on the square, I could see the dictatorship disappearing before my eyes.”

Orbán has dominated Hungarian politics for much of the intervening decades, and is now in his fourth spell as prime minister. His government has pursued far-right and sometimes pro-Kremlin policies, a far cry from his early radical days.

“Then, he was a defender of freedom. Today we can see a politician who is a friend of Putin and liquidates everything that is independent, civil and free in this country,” said Michnik.

Orbán stands accused of clamping down on independent research in history and science, and trying to rewrite Hungarian history to whitewash the rightwing interwar government of Miklós Horthy, which colluded with the Nazis.

Nagy is an ambiguous figure for Orbán. The 1956 revolution is still commemorated, but Nagy, though a reformer, was a committed communist and thus an inconvenient hero. Orbán did not attend the commemoration, but privately visited Nagy’s grave with his wife on Sunday morning to lay flowers.

Late last year, a statue to Nagy was removed from its position outside parliament, where it had stood since 1996, as part of a plan to return the square around the parliament to the way it looked in the 1930s, before the imposition of communist rule. It will be replaced by a statue to the victims of a brief communist government in 1919. Sunday’s ceremony was conducted at the new location of the Nagy statue half a mile away.

The anniversary of the reburial also coincided with a move by Orbán’s government against the 1956 Institute, a group of historians working on the communist period in Hungary, which is being folded into a government-created institute, Veritas.

“Veritas was established five years ago by the Orbán government with the clear duty to create, express, popularise a nationalist-populist view of contemporary history,” said János Rainer, a biographer of Nagy and one of the founding members of the 1956 Institute, which was set up in the days after the reburial of Nagy in 1989.

The 10 employees of the 1956 Institute found out about their fate in the media two weeks ago. Rainer was taking his daughter’s pet parrot to the vet when he received a call from a colleague informing him of press reports saying the institute was to be merged into Veritas in 15 days’ time.

The parrot survived, but the institute did not. Rainer said the historians at the institute were “shocked, horrified and in a desperate mood” and that more than half the staff members had resigned or planned to. His last day of work at the institute was on Friday.

It follows a pattern of what independent researchers say is a high-handed approach from the Hungarian government that allows for only minimal consultation or discussion of its centralising policies.

The country’s Academy of Sciences, an umbrella body of scientific researchers, is also being brought under government control, and says it was given 54 minutes to respond to the initial email informing it that it was to be reorganised.

While there is still a flourishing intellectual life and university scene in Hungary, historians say they worry that the wind is blowing in the direction of centralisation and censorship. The Central European University, an English-language institution founded by the Hungarian-American philanthropist George Soros, is moving some of its operations to Vienna after losing a long battle with the government.

“Academic freedom is in danger in Hungary now, just as all independent and free communities of all kinds,” said Rainer, but he added that he was still optimistic the “true research community” would continue with independent historical inquiry.