Boris Rubashkin, whose real surname is Chernorubashkin, was born on June 17, 1932, in Sofia. He is known as an Austrian and Russian opera singer (baritone), as well as a performer of Russian songs and romances.

His father, Don Cossack Semyon Terentyevich Chernorubashkin, was from the southern part of Russia (now the Danilovsky district of the Volgograd region) and was forced to flee to Bulgaria through Turkey after his older brother was executed by the Bolsheviks. Boris's mother, Teodora Lilova, was Bulgarian. He was named Boris in honor of Bulgarian Tsar Boris III and was baptized according to Cossack traditions.

From childhood, Boris was passionate about music and dance, attending a choreography club. His first job was without education, collecting daily revenue in stores as a cashier.

He passed a competition and was accepted into the dance ensemble of the Bulgarian Ministry of Internal Affairs, where he became a soloist in two years while simultaneously studying at an economic institute.

According to legend, in Prague, Boris worked washing cars and once met an Austrian diplomat who helped him obtain documents allowing him to work as a driver for the embassy. This same diplomat helped arrange a visa for Boris's wife through the Yugoslav embassy.

Initially, Boris worked at a factory and then became a singer at the restaurant 'Firebird.' In 1967, he won a competition for the position of baritone at the Salzburg Opera, after which he stopped performing in restaurants.

In the early 1970s, he officially adopted the pseudonym Rubashkin. At the same time, at the request of a French publisher, he wrote music and staged the dance 'Kazachok.' In 1989, Boris Rubashkin became the first of the previously banned singers in the USSR to perform concerts in Moscow. At his concert at the Estrada Theater on Bersenevskaya Embankment, he was accompanied by an orchestra led by Pyotr Khudyakov, a second-wave emigrant living in Austria and heading one of the 'fragments' of the Don Cossack choir of Sergey Zharov.