I believe that your friend's memory has everything to do with the Normanist theory and anti-Normanist sentiment, particularly the suppression of Gerhardt Friedrich Müller's thesis in 1749 by Empress Elizabeth of Russia (not Catherine the Great). It addressed the issue of origin of rulers of Kyivan Rus, the identity of the Rus' and Varangian people and the very word "Rus".

The "Normanist" view boils down to the idea of Varangians/Rus' being Viking adventurers who came east from the area of modern Sweden, sailing down rivers and settling in what is today Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and eastern Baltic states. They were gradually assimilated by Slavic tribes but played a major role in the politics and history of the area; this would include the Rurik dynasty, the lineage of princes and later tsars that ruled Russia until 1598.

Today, this idea of Varangians being Scandinavian is part of mainstream science, but it was extremely controversial in mid-18th century Russia and stays controversial for some overly patriotic Russians even now. The implications of Scandinavian origins of Rus' are hurtful to Russian national pride: it would seem that the ancestors of Russians were subhuman barbarians inherently incapable of creating their own national states, and they had to be conquered and civilized by superior Western people. This is not something actually proposed by "Normanist" historicians but this is the strawman that has been ferociously attacked by "anti-Normanists" since 1740s.

First major proponents of the Normanist theory in Russia, Gottlieb Ziegfried Bayer, Gerhardt Friedrich Müller and later August Ludwig von Schlözer, were German scholars in the service or Russian emperors. Bayer didn't even speak Russian, and his early works about Varangians, written in Latin in 1730s, didn't get much traction. The issue became very political by 1740s: while the court of Empress Anna was heavily dominated by foreigners, particularly Germans, the court of Empress Elizabeth, who seized power in 1741, easily swung to Russian nationalism. In addition, Sweden was an old enemy of the Russian Empire, and the idea of Swedish roots of Russian state were particularly insulting for Russians after the victory in Russo-Swedish War of 1741–1743.

Indeed, it was easy for Russian polymath Mikhail Lomonosov to bash Müller's ideas as non-patriotic; Müller's thesis "The origin of the people and the name of Russia", initally prepared to be presented on Elizabeth's name day in October 1749, was denounced and destroyed, with no printed Russian copies surviving. In the light of Lomonosov's vicious criticism, Müller's ideas of alleged Swedish conquest of ancient Russia were seen to be destructive for Russia. Müller was temporarily demoted in the Academy, and Lomonosov was officially charged by the imperial court with writing a proper (patriotic) ancient history of Russia, which he published a decade later, in 1760.

Being a polymath is hard: Lomonosov was a brilliant chemist, painter and poet, but he had to compete with professional historians and linguists. According to Lomonosov, the Rus' were not Scandinavian but Slavic nobles; he associated the name Rus' with the Roxolani, nomadic Sarmatian people known from Roman history, and claimed them to be East Slavic and ancestors of Russians. In his opinion, Rurik was one of Polabian Slavs, not a Scandinavian.

Normanist ideas did not gone but slowly became mainstream. In 1760s, the same Müller published milder but better substantiated works on the subject, proposing that the name Rus' referred to various peoples living on the southern shores of the Baltic Sea, and the their appearance in the eastern lands was more like like a slow ingress rather than a one-time conquest. 1940s saw another surge of anti-Normanism among Russian historicians, heated by anti-German sentiment and being the reaction to Third Reich propaganda pointing to alleged Varangian conquest of Slavic lands as part of millenia-old drive of Germanic people to cut out the Lebensraum in the east and the original proof of inferiority of Slavic peoples.

Even in 21st century, this old discussion somehow pops back to existence. No more than a month ago, big history buff Vladimir Putin casually claimed that "adepts of the Norman theory of the Rus establishment are actually wrong", Rurik's mother was Slavic (apparently referring to another patriotic source from 1740s, Vasily Tatishchev's History of Russia), and Rurik, already having some connections to the Slavic people, was invited by the sovereign Novgorod state and did not conquer anything.