In June, Andrey Filatov, a Russian billionaire, chess enthusiast and art collector, sent letters to the governments of New York City and Sitka, Alaska. Both locales had decided, amid renewed calls for racial justice, to remove controversial monuments: a 10-foot tall statue of Theodore Roosevelt astride a horse outside Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History, and a bronze of Alexander Baranov, a Russian colonialist, perched on a rock and lost in thought, greeting visitors to a Sitka civic center.