Vatagin was born in Moscow in the Russian Empire where his father was a school teacher.

He obtained a PhD degree in zoology and studied for two years at the art school of Konstantin Yuon.

From 1908 he began to work in a range of media and learned sculpture and lithography spending some time in Berlin.

Between 1924 and 1929 he produced masks of the people of the Soviet Union for the Moscow Museum of Ethnology.

At the Moscow State Darwin Museum he produced a number of sculptures and panels under the direction of Aleksandr Kots.