Nikolai Andreevich Myagotin was born on May 9, 1918, into a poor peasant family in the village of Korobeynikovo, Kurgan County, Tobolsk Province, now known as Kolesnikovo, the administrative center of the Kolesnikovsky rural council in the Ketu region of the Kurgan region. His father, Andrei Petrovich Myagotin, according to the Soviet version, was a Red Guard who died in the Civil War in 1918, while the post-Soviet version states he died of cholera in the fall of the same year. The family had four children.

After the death of his father, his mother, Arina Osipovna, sent Kolya to an orphanage in the village of Mokrousovo, where he was raised until the age of 11 and joined the All-Union Pioneer Organization named after V. I. Lenin. Upon returning to his mother, he excelled in school and worked in the collective farm named after the VIII District Congress during the summer. Nikolai actively participated in public life: he was a leader of a pioneer group, a member of the school committee, and part of the editorial board of the school newspaper.

Nikolai Andreevich Myagotin died on October 25, 1932, near the village of Kolesnikovo. He was buried in the same village, now part of the Ketu region of the Kurgan area. On December 30, 1932, an extraordinary session of the Ural Regional Court in Kurgan sentenced five residents of Kolesnikovo to execution under Article 58-8 'Terrorist Acts' for the murder of Nikolai Myagotin, six others to ten years of imprisonment, and one to a year of forced labor. After the trial, Petya Vakhrushev disappeared, and a week later, his mother was found hanged.

In 1999, the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation fully rehabilitated ten people involved in the murder of Nikolai Myagotin, declaring them innocent. The crime committed by Fotei Sychev and Ivan Vakhrushev was reclassified from a political charge under Article 58-8 to a criminal charge under Article 136.

The kulaks attempted to undermine the young collective farm by damaging equipment and stealing livestock. Pioneer Kolya Myagotin wrote about their actions in the district newspaper and reported a major theft of collective farm bread to the village council. In October 1932, kulak Fotei Sychev incited the Vakhrushev brothers to kill Kolya, using his friendship with Petya Vakhrushev. Petya persuaded Kolya to go for sunflowers, where he was met by Ivan Vakhrushev and severely wounded. Petya informed his brother that Kolya was still alive, and Fotei completed the execution.

However, Kolya was not a pioneer and did not expose the embezzlers. He went with Petr Vakhrushev for sunflowers and was wounded by a watchman. Petr ran home to have his brother take the wounded Kolya to the hospital, but his brother was drunk, and Fotei Sychev killed Kolya. Vakhrushev initially spoke about the watchman but later changed his testimony, implicating the brothers.

State prosecutor B. Sakharov, who reviewed the case in the 1990s, believes that there was no political component to what happened. The theft of bread and the broken belt on the thresher occurred after Nikolai's death, so he could not have written a denunciation. The fact of the bread theft was not proven, and the crime was reclassified as criminal.