More than 160,000 artifacts have gone missing from Russian museums in the last 80 years, according to an inventory ordered by President Vladimir Putin, the government said on Tuesday.The investigation was launched after it came to light that $5 million worth of exhibits had been spirited out of St Petersburg' s Hermitage Museum by a curator." The main thing we have found is that over the past 80 years, 160,000 items have gone missing," First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said at a meeting on the inventory." The situation is very alarming. We have probed 500 museums with 20 million items. That is one quarter of the country' s total museum collection," he said in comments shown on Russia' s Vesti-24 news channel.Russian museums, many housing priceless but poorly-guarded collections, were thrown into crisis during the chaos that followed the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union.State funding dried up and staff were offered huge sums by criminal groups who specialize in the export of stolen art works to lucrative markets in Europe, Asia and north America.A Russian court in March jailed a history teacher for stealing some 200 silver and enamel artifacts with the collusion of his wife, a long-serving curator at the Hermitage.Nikolai Zavadsky pleaded guilty to the thefts. He said before his trial that he took many of the items to pawnshops and used the cash to buy insulin for his diabetic wife Larissa.The thefts came to light when she died of a heart attack during an audit of the collection she and her husband had been plundering. Many of the items turned up in art salons and even pawnbrokers in St Petersburg.