In the summer of 1942, Rubtsov's mother and younger sister died, their father was at the front, and the children were sent to boarding schools.

In the same village, his daughter Yelena was subsequently born in a de-facto marriage with Henrietta Mikhailovna Menshikova.

In his autobiography, written upon entering the trawl fleet in 1952, Nikolay wrote that his father went to the front and died in 1941.

Rubtsov was killed on the night of 19 January 1971, at the age of 35, in his apartment, the result of a domestic dispute with an aspiring poet Lyudmyla Derbina.

The judicial investigation established that the death was violent, occurred as a result of suffocation – mechanical asphyxia from squeezing the neck with her hands.