thanks. it is what I thought but it is also not very much in use in French or maybe for something I am not familiar with. The communist collective farm is something familiar.

Kollektiv in several Scandinavian languages means commune, as a group of people who live together and share a common ideology. Could it be this? I wonder if a Romanian native speaker can help us with this.

The rule is that Romanian prepositions do not generally require the following noun to have a definite article with the exception of the preposition of "cu." I remember this rule by thinking to myself that all Romanian preposition are super strong -- they are so strong in fact, that they already have the definite article "the" baked into them (with the exception of poor little "cu" which is only two letters and so, is so weak that he couldn't take the extra weight of carrying around a definite article with him, poor little guy). So, for example, to say, "I go to through the kitchen," you would say, "merg prin bucăterie" because the definite article "the" is already baked into the Romanian preposition "prin."

Of course, this doesn't explain the fact that in many cases, when someone is referring to something truly definite, the definite article appears to be used with non-"cu" prepositions in spite of this so-called rule described above. Also, I fully realize that there are other two letter prepositions other than "cu" that don't behave like "cu" in this regard -- this is just my silly way of remembering this rule, not that the number of letters is dispositive as to whether the preposition is "strong" in this sense or not.

My way of thinking about this is probably all wrong from a linguistic/grammatical point of view, but sometimes it helps to come up with silly ways to remember stuff like this.